Right when you were starting to wonder about Bo Horvat, there he was.
There he was in the first period Tuesday night, breaking a goal-scoring drought that lasted — depending how you want to classify it — six games, over a month or across two different injuries, getting on the end of Mat Barzal’s rebound.
And there he was in overtime, all alone on a breakaway, burying the puck past Stuart Skinner to hand the Islanders a 5-4 win over the Penguins that was absolutely massive, both for the team’s psyche and for their playoff chances.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel good,” Horvat said. “Always great to get on the scoreboard. It’s always great to score and help your team that way.
“There’s other parts of my game that I take a lot of pride in. Faceoffs, penalty kill — [if] things aren’t going the way I want it to go offensively, I got other things to fall back on. Definitely feels good to get that one tonight.”
Some 24 hours earlier, Horvat had sounded not too keen at all to emphasize those parts of his game following a 4-1 loss to the Capitals in which he missed a pair of breakaway chances that could’ve changed the tide of the game, getting denied by the knob of goaltender Clay Stevenson’s stick on one and missing the net entirely on the other.
“It’s kinda on me there,” Horvat had told The Post in Washington. “I gotta start scoring those opportunities I’m getting. Two breakaways today, a couple odd-man rushes. It’s not going in right now. I gotta figure out a way to get it done.
“… It’s just not going in. I gotta hit the net on that one breakaway. [Stevenson] gets his knob on the second. He played well tonight, their goalie played really well. Gotta give them some credit.”
Funny how that can work sometimes.
Horvat has four other multigoal games this season, but the last had come back on Dec. 9, two days before he suffered the first of two injuries that kept him out for chunks of December, then January.
That played a large role in blunting his red-hot scoring tear that had seen Horvat start the season on a 40-goal pace that would have easily amounted to a career-high.
He’s unlikely to get that number now. On Tuesday, nothing could have been further from his mind.
Anthony Duclair played just 3:04 total Tuesday, sitting the rest of the night after the 16:43 mark of the third after having been on the ice for Anthony Mantha’s opening goal.
“It was an important game,” Roy said. “Duke will be fine. Did not like the tracking. That’s all. It’s nothing more than that.”
