SAN JOSE, Calif. — The fourth loss in a row for the Islanders was more alarming than the first three for two big reasons.
First, the Sharks are not the Oilers, Hurricanes or Devils. Talented they may be, but the club that beat the Islanders 3-2 in a shootout at SAP Center on Monday night is not a Stanley Cup contender. San Jose is now 8-11-1, still very much figuring itself out.
Second, the Islanders played poorly for most of this game, and it’s not the first time lately. They were hemmed in their zone frequently, they gave up chances in the middle of the ice, they struggled to hang onto possession of the puck or generate a forecheck. It was, in other words, not Pete DeBoer hockey.
“We’re giving up too many chances, we’re giving up too many shots,” captain Bo Horvat said. “It’s just not sustainable for 84 games. We got to get back to the way we were the first 10 games, and that’s playing well defensively, reloading hard and making it tougher on teams. Right now, we’re giving up too many shots.”
That was excusable against the league’s top class. Against the Sharks, less so, even if it took a shootout winner from Ivar Stenberg to put San Jose over the top.
Even had the Islanders gotten away with a win — and to be fair, they were close to doing so — this was still a performance that invited scrutiny.
“I think we both played smart for stretches and we both played really badly for stretches,” DeBoer said. “… The self-inflicted parts of the game where we didn’t stick with it costs us.”
Of course, the big-picture outlook comes with the massive caveat that there is “potential,” as DeBoer has said, for Mathew Barzal, Matias Maccelli and Ryan Pulock to return from injury by the end of this trip. That ought to be a game-changer, and there is no doubt at all that a lot of what’s happened over the past week-plus has been about the collective toll of the injuries catching up with the Islanders.
Still, they were bossed around for long stretches on Monday, particularly by San Jose’s top line of Michael Misa, Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith. Even when they weren’t, it often looked like a track meet and not the detailed hockey the Islanders want to play.
The clubs were tied at two entering a heated third period after Kyle MacLean’s hit on Stenberg provoked Ty Dellandrea to fight MacLean and Barclay Goodrow to fight Mitchell Chaffee off the ensuing faceoff.
That did at least seem to wake the Islanders up a little bit as they started the third on the front foot.
Maybe, after the fury at officials in Saturday’s Islanders loss, there was some karmic justice as well, after a Victor Eklund hit on Kiefer Sherwood initially called a major was reversed into a roughing double minor on Mason Marchment, handing the Islanders a four-minute power play midway through the third.
The fledgling momentum, though, was squandered when Anthony Duclair and Ondrej Palat both took penalties trying to stop a shorthanded San Jose rush, putting the Islanders at four-on-three and, eventually, leaving both teams scoreless on their respective power plays.
“That’s the game right there,” DeBoer said of those sequences in the third. “I loved how we started. I think we had five or six grade-A looks in the first five minutes of the third period. You gotta stick one in the net.”
There was no missed call to complain about this time at three-on-three, only a frenetic five minutes without resolution. Ilya Sorokin, strong all evening with 37 saves, was terrific in overtime, and it took the Sharks eight rounds of the shootout to beat him.
Problem was, the Islanders couldn’t get anything by Yaroslav Askarov either.
“I didn’t think, overall, it was our best game system-wise or on the little details,” Jean-Gabriel Pageau told The Post. “I thought there were some good parts and we need to focus on those, and try to be better where we didn’t. I’m not worried about the process or anything.”
The best minutes of the game for the Islanders were the first handful. After Ben Hutton opened a 1-0 lead by getting to a deflected Simon Holmstrom pass first, the Sharks started pressing, and the visitors never quite recovered their mojo, even as the game stayed close — with Stenberg, Eklund and Tyler Toffoli all trading goals.
“Mentally, we have to commit to playing the same way every night,” Horvat said. “We know what it’s gonna take to be successful. We know what our really good game looks like. Just, we haven’t been doing it these last five games for a full 60.”
