PHILADELPHIA — The Islanders didn’t have to wait on the Canadiens.
They got the suspense out of the way early on Saturday, losing to the Flyers 4-3 on Bobby Brink’s shootout winner to write in ink what’s been clear for a couple weeks now, that the Islanders won’t be going to the playoffs.
Having lost eight of their last 10 coming into Saturday, the season flying off the rails after a controversial goaltender interference call reversed Kyle Palmieri’s apparent game-winner against the Blue Jackets back on March 24, the question of whether the Islanders would be eliminated on Saturday or Sunday, via a loss or a Canadiens victory, was merely academic.
If you’ve spent any time watching the Islanders over the last week, they’ve checked every box of a team playing out the string. Defense has become optional, physicality even more so, the games taking on a decidedly preseason feel.
For two periods and change on Saturday, it looked like the Islanders would at least get the consolation prize of forcing the Canadiens to eliminate them later in the day.
Instead, after the Islanders took a 2-1 lead into the third period, the Flyers started to take advantage of a defense that had looked leaky all afternoon, with Owen Tippett scything through the Islanders on the rush and feeding Jakob Pelletier to tie the game at the 4:29 mark before assisting Tyson Foerster just over six minutes later to give the Flyers a 3-2 lead.
Bo Horvat tied the game with a minute left in regulation, his shot at six-on-five bouncing off a Flyer and in, but one point wasn’t enough for the Islanders.
The Islanders got nothing else from there, going scoreless in overtime and the shootout alike, with Samuel Ersson stopping Kyle Palmieri’s attempt to seal it.
To make matters worse, Pierre Engvall suffered what appeared to be a non-contact injury to his left knee in the final minutes of regulation., skating off with the trainer without any weight on his left side.
Now the questions can, officially, turn inward ahead of what is set to be a pivotal summer for the organization. No. 1 on the docket is the twin futures of general manager Lou Lamoriello and coach Patrick Roy, which will need to be addressed once the season wraps on Thursday.
And after questions surrounded Lamoriello for much of the year, the late-season implosion shifted the spotlight over to Roy, whose team came up short in his first full year behind the bench.
Just as pressing as the club’s faulty record were some of Roy’s actions over the last couple weeks, namely ripping into Anthony Duclair so harshly after a loss to Tampa that Duclair took a leave of absence and Roy’s bizarre decision to bring Tristan Lennox into Friday’s loss to the Rangers and then take him out after seeing just two shots, embarrassing the youngster in his NHL debut.
Those aren’t the only times Roy has raised eyebrows this season — his early-season burying of Samuel Bolduc and yearlong treatment of Pierre Engvall come to mind, with Engvall being the clearest example of a rift between Roy and Lamoriello that’s been rumored for months.
At the beginning of the year, it was thought that after getting the Lane Lambert hire wrong, Lamoriello might not be able to change coaches again so soon, if that was something he even wanted to do. If it’s one or the other, though, Roy has given the general manager plenty of evidence to build a case to ownership.
That, of course, goes the other way, too. The start of Lamoriello’s tenure marked the franchise’s most successful years since the Dynasty and if not for a few what-ifs, it’s easy to picture the 2020 or 2021 runs to the NHL’s final four having ended in championships.
It looks clear now, though, that the group Lamoriello stuck behind for years after that has gone stale. Trading Brock Nelson at the trade deadline started the process of remaking it, but it’s reasonable for ownership to ask whether Lamoriello is the person to see that process out.
In a summer of huge decisions, these are the two biggest facing the organization
