It’s been a long time since the Islanders played a period as good as the middle 20 minutes on Saturday.
It’s been a long time since the Islanders had a win as good as the 4-3 victory over the Hurricanes they earned at UBS Arena.
The pattern of the last few weeks has been that the Islanders have won on Saturdays and lost on every other day of the week, so the jury is out on whether or not this represents a real step forward for the club which became the Eastern Conference’s last team to reach double-digit victories by finally crossing the threshold.
However, after a disastrous showing Thursday that carried over into the first period against the ’Canes, the Islanders were bordering on crisis mode if they could not pull themselves together — and that is just what they did in a four-goal outburst in the second.
It was, in particular, the Islanders’ response to Andrei Svechnikov’s second power-play goal of the night — which gave Carolina a 2-1 lead after Anders Lee was mistakenly called for a high stick on Martin Necas — that the team can hang its hat on.
Oliver Wahlstrom re-tied the score just 47 seconds later, beating Pyotr Kochetkov after Casey Cizikas won the puck back off the forecheck.
From there, the last 10 minutes of the period were all Islanders.
They owned the puck. They won battles.
They generated pressure around the net and in the high-danger areas.
It was everything they had not done Thursday, or for that matter in a lackadaisical opening period against Carolina on Saturday.
It resulted in goals from Max Tsyplakov, who batted in his own rebound, and from Bo Horvat, who finished off J-G Pageau’s feed on the rush to break a 13-game scoreless drought that had been weighing heavily on his psyche.
Despite that, there was still the not-so-small matter of holding the lead, and the less said about the Islanders’ recent record of doing that, the better.
The Hurricanes did indeed come with a push in the third and it was in no small measure down to Ilya Sorokin, who was pulled from Thursday’s match, to keep the lead intact.
That the goalie did.
This was not going to turn into a rerun of every other blown lead.
This was not going to turn into a rerun of multiple playoff games against the Hurricanes over the past two years.
A chance for the Islanders to come undone did present itself when Anders Lee and Carolina netminder Kochetkov were called for twin interference penalties after colliding in a race to the puck, with Lee, the Islanders bench and everyone in attendance sharing a justified lack of comprehension over the call.
Instead of unspooling, though, the Islanders battened down the hatches.
Instead of buckling, the Islanders survived, ceding a six-on-five goal to Jesperi Kotkaniemi, but holding on for victory.
That makes it two straight third-period leads successfully held, the sort of stat that should not matter, but certainly does to a team for whom this has been a constant problem.
It is, in theory, a nice building block.
So too is a win over the Hurricanes.
But if the Islanders fall into the same pattern as the last few weeks, it will be for naught.
