Islanders still desperately searching for fix to woeful power play with time running out

TAMPA — It’s nearly April, with three weeks to go in the regular season and 11 games left in the Islanders’ season.

Teams are what they are.

There’s no magic fix coming, no trade deadline to look forward to.

The odds the Islanders find some kind of magic bullet for their no good, very bad, terrible power play are next to nil.

But can they at least get this thing functioning, hit the bare minimum where it doesn’t cause stomachs to tighten every time a penalty is called against an opposing team, which, remember, is supposed to be a good thing?

That’s the question right now, with the Islanders having scored on the power play in just one of their last nine games, the struggling five-on-four units having been a major factor in their last two losses to Columbus and Vancouver, respectively.

It’s not for lack of trying.

Chunks of practice time have been devoted to the power play, including on Friday.

Adam Boqvist is set to replace Mike Reilly in the lineup against the Lightning on Saturday afternoon, a move coach Patrick Roy said was “only power-play-related.”

What else to expect after Roy sounded resigned Wednesday night about the power play after it failed to generate on a pair of third-period chances that could have gotten the Islanders back into the game against the Canucks?

“Not really,” he said, asked if anything had been better than two nights prior. “We had a chance. [Noah Dobson] missed the net on that one, on the breakout. But no, we didn’t generate much on the power play.”

He has talked frequently about puck retrieval, tried to be optimistic that when the Islanders actually get set up in the offensive zone, they look sort of fine.

It’s just a matter of getting that far, which has proven a constant challenge.

“We worked on it today. It’s not going to be pretty every time you enter the zone, not going to be perfect,” Bo Horvat told The Post on Friday. “To go and support and help each other in the battles, I think is going to be our biggest thing and then just making the play from there. If we recover the puck, settling things down and getting more pucks towards the net, obviously, is huge.”

It’s vexing, especially, because when the Islanders have it going, these are things they do well at five-on-five.

In the loss to Columbus on Tuesday, all four lines were supporting each other, retrieving pucks, winning battles at five-on-five.

Then the Islanders got a power play and all of that evaporated.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the lack of confidence permeating the team every time they get a power play chance.

That’s part of it.

“More pucks we throw at the net, more chances we’re going to [get],” Roy said. “It’s move that puck quick and try to find those open seams when you shoot and I think this is how it’s going to bring some confidence. It’s throwing pucks at the net and compete and try to get some rebounds.”

Horvat put the mental part of it in slightly more damning terms.

“You have to have a certain mindset, I think, for sure,” Horvat said. “The mindset of working before you get set up, I think, is the big thing. You’re not just going right to your position, you’re helping your teammate out before you get there and then vice versa. So for us, it’s just about work ethic out there.”

In other words: if the Islanders could work a little harder, it might go a long way.