Slow start drops Islanders below .500 after loss to Wild

Five bad minutes can kill you against a good team.

That’s just what happened to the Islanders on Sunday night.

Against the playoff-caliber Minnesota Wild, the Isles needed to come out with a jump in their step. Instead, they were down by two goals before they could get their legs under them, on their way to a 4-3 loss that puts them below .500, at 15-16-6.

With the Isles struggling to get through the neutral zone, Brandon Duhaime put the Wild on the board with a rebound on Joel Eriksson Ek’s shot at 3:36. Just 63 seconds later, Eriksson Ek got one for himself, taking what was essentially a free look from low in the zone and scoring when the Islanders failed to get in his shooting lane on a power play.

For the next 55 minutes, the Islanders were, on net, the better team. They forced 40 saves out of Kaapo Kahkonen, generated chances and put the Wild on their back foot. But they came away from the night without a point.

One of these teams is sitting in a playoff spot and on its way to doing something this season. The other is swimming against the current in the race to get above .500. Five minutes encapsulated that as well as anything.

Once the Islanders got settled, they played well. Brock Nelson cut the lead in half seconds after a power play expired at 13:56 of the first.

Robin Salo’s turnover behind the Islanders net led to a Matt Boldy goal that made it 3-1 at 2:39 of the second, but Ross Johnston got it back with a breakaway goal after Duhaime turned it over in Minnesota’s zone less than two minutes later.

The Islanders more than doubled Minnesota’s shot total in the second period and finished the game outshooting the Wild, 43-21.

A grade-A chance came when Kyle Palmieri fed Anthony Beauvillier on the doorstep with about 12 minutes to go in the game, but Beauvillier’s redirect went just wide. Less than five minutes later, Kirill Kaprizov redirected Dumba’s shot from the point past Ilya Sorokin to make it 4-2.

The Islanders made it a tight last few minutes when Oliver Wahlstrom scored a diving power-play goal on a rebound at the four-minute mark, but despite a slew of chances, the Islanders couldn’t get one to go at six-on-five as Kahkonen stood tall.

In the other crease, Sorokin’s save percentage was under .900 for a second straight night, as he stopped just 17 of 21 Minnesota shots.

Ultimately, though, the two early goals the Islanders gave up made a comeback too big of a hill to climb.

And the loss, yet another against a playoff team, puts them even further out of the playoff picture.

Now back below .500 with only two games left before the All-Star break, the Islanders’ margin for error has all but evaporated. They’re 17 points behind Boston, the wild-card team with the fewest points in the East, and despite games in hand, the playoffs look more and more like a pipe dream each day.

That is due to the math, yes. But it’s also because the Islanders do not look like a team capable of making the kind of run they need to make right now.

On Sunday, the Islanders weren’t all too far from the kind of win that could have generated some momentum and reversed the narrative. In the end, though, they were five minutes away.

Source: NYPOST