The Senators got the Islanders started on this tailspin by beating them a month ago in Ottawa. And they may have delivered the dagger to the Islanders season Saturday afternoon on Long Island.
The Islanders playoff odds hit life support as an 0-for-5 power play sent them on the fast track to a 3-0 defeat at home to the Senators, just their second shutout loss of the season.
The second wild-card spot is now officially out of reach, and the Islanders could be eliminated from playoff contention altogether as soon as Sunday.
Not only must the Islanders overtake the Flyers, who sit three points ahead with both teams still yet to play two games., they are also now behind the Blue Jackets by one point and the Capitals on a regulation wins tiebreaker already clinched by Washington.
So to make the playoffs, the Islanders need to win both their games, they need the Flyers to lose both their games and they need Columbus and Washington both to drop at least a point.
“Our season didn’t end tonight,” coach Pete DeBoer said. “As tough as that feels walking out of the rink here today, we gotta be prepared to take care of business, which is winning the last two games. If someone’s gonna beat us out of that last playoff spot, we gotta make them earn it.”
While the Islanders had no choice but to be realistic about their chances of pulling off a miracle after firing Patrick Roy and hiring DeBoer with four games left in the season, the dressing room afterward was something bordering on stunned.
The urgency that had been missing over the last few weeks under Roy was there Saturday. This loss was a matter of execution — on the power play and in the offensive zone — as the Islanders let a solid performance go to waste.
“Felt like we worked our asses off tonight,” Cal Ritchie told The Post. “We worked hard tonight. Felt like we deserved better. We gotta win these next two to have a shot, that’s our focus.”
Start with the power play, because it has been an issue all season and because it was the central issue Saturday.
The Islanders were not only an abysmal 0-for-5, but had just three shots in 10 minutes of power-play time.
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For good measure, they let up a short-handed goal to Ridly Greig, who got up ice after Tony DeAngelo could not get to Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s drop pass at the top of the zone, and finished Michael Amadio’s feed for a 1-0 lead at 13:06 of the first.
Ottawa carried that lead into the third period as the Islanders, again and again, fumbled chances and did not so much as look threatening on the power play.
Their fifth chance of the game at 5-on-4 came at 7:17 of the third and may have been their worst. The Islanders struggled to enter the zone and looked hesitant to shoot when they did. It was a lack of confidence personified.
“They held the blue line really well,” Anders Lee said. “You watched our break-ins, we couldn’t get in. … They were on top of it from the get-go, right across the blue line. They made it really difficult to get set up. When we did get set up, we had some looks and some chances. They denied quite a bit coming into the zone.”
Adding insult to injury, Ottawa sealed the game on its own 5-on-3 power play, when Jake Sanderson cleaned up Dylan Cozens’ rebound to extend the lead to 2-0 at 12:36 of the third.
Amadio tacked on an empty-netter to seal it with 2:31 to go.
On the ice from Long Island
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During training camp, the common refrain was that if the Islanders had been just average on the power play a year ago, they would have made the playoffs.
They achieved average on the penalty kill, but have been entirely unable to do so on the power play, and it appears set to make the difference again.
The Islanders were up ice for much of a match that was played with playoff-like physicality from the moment Anders Lee and Brady Tkachuk dropped gloves off the opening faceoff.
They finished every check, and Kyle MacLean came flying after Nikolas Matinpalo for good measure when the Finn got in a shoving match with Matthew Schaefer early on.
They could not, though, penetrate a note-perfect Ottawa defensive structure. The Senators did a terrific job keeping the Islanders to the outside and out of the danger areas all game long. Offensive-zone cycles were rendered useless, and there were no odd-man rushes to speak of.
It made for a game in which the Islanders had little choice but to convert their power-play chances to win.
This team has never found a way to win games with that recipe.
And now their season may end Tuesday because of it.
