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The Islanders liked the direction in which they were trending over the season’s first four games.
Until Saturday, though, they had not been tested against a true contender.
Now they have, and while the Islanders can be happy with pieces of their game, the overall results won’t be to their liking.
The Lightning were faster and smarter. Mostly, Tampa Bay played a more complete 60 minutes than the Islanders in beating them 5-3 at UBS Arena on the back of Brandon Hagel’s hat trick.
“Just didn’t show up quite on time,” coach Pete DeBoer said. “But when we did show up, we went nose to nose with them.”
Want to know why it’s so important to take care of business on nights like Thursday against Chicago or this coming Tuesday against Vancouver? Saturday is why.
It is a testament to their resilience as well as their penalty-killing on a night when the Islanders spent more than seven minutes in the box that they entered the late stages of the game still very much in it.
As has been the case a few times early this season, the Islanders grew into the game as it went on, finally starting to apply pressure and take away Andrei Vasilevskiy’s eyes in the second period. That resulted in Tony DeAngelo’s goal that made it 2-1, while Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s that made it 3-2 at 11:41 of the period may have been more about Matthew Schaefer’s supreme skill.
Schaefer walked the line, deked Anthony Cirelli clean and let loose a shot that Pageau tipped past Vasilevskiy before an emphatic celebration.
At that point, Schaefer started to take over the game. His skill on the puck helped set up the game-tying goal with seven seconds left in the second period, as a juggling keep-in led to Brayden Schenn getting to Kyle Palmieri’s pass across, with Erik Cernak’s stick giving a last touch on the way into the net.
That gave way to a rollicking third, by far the most entertaining hockey the Islanders have played this season: end-to-end, physical, breathless.
With under two minutes to go, it was still deadlocked at 3-3, but the Lightning again had started to tilt the ice. It didn’t take a long offensive-zone shift to take the lead, though: Hagel beat Ilya Sorokin clean on an innocuous-looking shot from the right circle with 1:44 to go and then completed his hat trick into an empty net just 21 seconds later.
“We passed quite a few of the tests in my mind of how we have to play,” DeBoer said. “You just have to do it for 60 minutes. You can’t spot a team like that two goals.”
The details and ethic that DeBoer is trying, bit by bit, to instill in this team have long since been perfected by Jon Cooper’s squad. There were stretches during which the Islanders looked on Tampa’s level, but also, over 60 minutes — and particularly the first 20 — too many when they did not.
Adam Pelech and Ryan Pulock, once a shutdown top pair in back-to-back conference finals against this team, epitomized it more than anyone. The duo, reunited in the wake of Alexander Romanov’s ACL tear, was badly victimized by Hagel, who skated through both of them to make it 2-0 Tampa late in the first, then a second time by Jake Guentzel, who was left free near the crease to score the Lightning’s third on the power play.
“The start, it’s just unacceptable,” Pelech told The Post. “Partially on me. I was on for a couple goals they scored in the first period. Better execution, I think more intensity of battles, winning more battles, committing more to the way we have to play to be successful right off the bat.”
The puck management, an issue on which DeBoer has harped over the last few days, was an issue too, particularly early in the game as the Islanders breakouts consistently were stymied by their own decision-making.
Two things that seem contradictory but are not: It is an unequivocal positive that the Islanders got better throughout the game, and it is unacceptable — perhaps game-losing — that they took 25 or so minutes to look like they were in it.
“We’re gonna get better,” Schaefer said. “We’re gonna have a better start, hopefully, next time and keep it going throughout the game.”
