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ANAHEIM, Calif. — They can still get better, and they can still get healthier. But it’s hard to escape the fact that on the night Mathew Barzal played for the first time all season, the Islanders played their best game in weeks.
By the end, it was less about Barzal and more about Simon Holmstrom’s first career hat trick, Matthew Schaefer’s three-point night and a series of great performances up and down the Islanders lineup. Barzal can certainly take credit for the vibes, though, and Saturday’s 6-2 win over the Ducks was exactly what the Islanders needed.
They’ll leave California with five of six points in hand from a trip they entered on a losing streak, and this game in particular was a reminder of what Pete DeBoer’s squad looks like when it’s rolling.
“I felt like it was the way I’ve been seeing it on TV,” Barzal said. “Everybody connected, guys reloading hard. Bench was positive all night. We rolled four lines and everybody was involved and contributed.”
The Islanders were crisp in their passing and attuned to their details. They skated with verve; all four lines had it going. When there were mistakes, they backchecked hard and found ways to make up for them.
A night that looked to be about Barzal, who notched an assist on his very first shift of the season, winning an offensive-zone faceoff and then feeding Ben Hutton, ended up being just as much about Holmstrom, Matias Maccelli and Schaefer.
Holmstrom scored a pair of goals 5:27 apart in the second period, first finishing off a delicious 1-2-3 passing sequence that started with Kyle Palmieri and Schaefer, then ripping another from the high slot after Bo Horvat fed him from down low.
He finished off the hat trick 2:41 into the third, fittingly enough from Victor Eklund’s feed, just one day after the Islanders’ Swedes made the trip to Disneyland together.
“It was a big relief,” Holmstrom said of his feeling after completing the hat trick. “It was a very nice feeling. So happy.”
Maccelli, perhaps the most underrated member of this team right now, was noticeable on nearly every shift below the hash marks and picked up two assists. Schaefer had three, including a feed to Mitchell Chaffee on the rush that made it 5-1 at 10:28 of the second period and ended the competitive portion of the night just after its halfway mark.
He finished the night a plus-3, led the Islanders in ice time and is now averaging over a point per game.
“That’s how we have to play, and that’s how we have to get contributions [from all four lines],” DeBoer said. “When that dries up — because of injuries or because we’re not getting that four-line contribution — we’re a much easier team to play against than we are when we’re getting that. That’s the identity of our group.”
It wasn’t perfect. You didn’t need a fine-tooth comb to pick out the Islanders puck management behind the net as an issue, with Hutton’s turnover leading to Nikita Nesterenko’s goal, and Casey Cizikas saving an earlier Nesterenko attempt after Semyon Varlamov’s ill-fated attempt to play the puck.
In no small part due to score effects, the back half of the game was mostly spent defending, with the Islanders picking their spots on the rush rather than tilting the ice.
Still, this was night and day from how the Islanders have looked lately. There was a confidence about them. The win put their seasonlong goal differential, which was at an even zero going into the night, back into the black.
If they can actually get healthy for a while, there are real possibilities for this team. The lineup Saturday — still missing two key pieces from its forward corps in Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Calum Ritchie — had a genuine weapon in its depth. Logan Stanley left the game in the second period with a lower-body injury and didn’t return, with DeBoer saying he would be evaluated upon the team’s return to New York. Barzal, who skated on the third line and the second power-play unit in an attempt to limit his ice time in his first game back, is still ramping up.
“As much as tonight was my first game back, it was also just a test to get a game rep in,” Barzal said. “… I knew it was gonna be a minute. Felt like I found it towards the end.”
The question of what the Islanders could look like at full strength still hasn’t been answered.
The foreshadowing Saturday, though, was all to the good.
