Islanders hurt playoff hopes with ugly loss to woeful Blackhawks
NY Post
What, you thought this would be easy? Well, it seems the Islanders did too.
Is there another reason for their inexcusable mess of a performance on home ice Tuesday night? For why, in the late stages of a playoff race in which every game is a must-win, Mathew Barzal — benched earlier this season over a failure to back-check — stopped skating to watch as Tyler Bertuzzi and Frank Nazar went up the ice on a two-on-none? For the way the Islanders came undone from there?
Surely not.
The game ended 4-3 to the Blackhawks, whose urgency and intensity outstripped that of the Islanders until the last period, when a frantic attempt at a comeback came up a hair short. If the Isles’ loss in Ottawa was a bad night, and their loss in Montreal felt like a shock to the system, then this was something far worse.
This one should make them angry, and it should make their fans angry. If the Islanders go on to miss the playoffs — and they are below the cut-line again after the results rolled in Tuesday — this one will stick out like a sore thumb.
“We had some turnovers that ended up in our net and then you get a shot that goes off a body behind the goalie and it’s 3-1. Other than mistakes, it has nothing to do with our intensity or will to win,” captain Anders Lee said, understandably shielding his teammates. “We just messed up. That’s gonna happen. You saw that will the rest of the way tonight.”
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