COLUMBUS, Ohio — Mat Barzal said Tuesday that it felt like the Islanders were playing out the same script night after night.
This one wasn’t quite the same as against Anaheim. But it will feel familiar nonetheless for a team that simply has not been able to put the puck in the net this season.
Rocking new lines and feeling some pressure after two straight losses, the Islanders — again — could not find anything to spark their struggling offense and dropped another winnable game, 2-0 to the Blue Jackets at Nationwide Arena.
After 10 games, their record is a terrible 3-5-2, and as early as it is in the season, the Islanders need to find a way to stop the train from rolling off the tracks.
It’s now four shutouts in 10 games, with the Islanders suddenly near their total number of games being shut out from a year ago (six) just a fraction of the way into the season.
Like Tuesday, the Islanders will come out of this one thinking they had the better chances, and that is a fair read of this one.
This, however, was a game without much free ice, where 0-0 entering the third seemed roughly accurate to how the match had gone.
The Islanders, who had already lost 1-0 twice before Wednesday, were pulling from a different script than the night before, but one they could easily read off book.
The backbreaking moment came 5:43 into the third with a cross-crease feed from Damon Severson. In a cruel twist, the puck caromed off the skate of Ryan Pulock before finding the back of the net, putting the Islanders in a 1-0 hole that might as well have been 6-0.
There was plenty of time left for the Islanders to push for the tying goal, but that push never really came, with the game flow looking pretty much the same at 1-0 as it did at 0-0. The Blue Jackets formalized the win on Justin Danforth’s empty-netter soon after Semyon Varlamov was pulled.
Try as they might, the Islanders are running into a wall on offense at the moment. After Patrick Roy spent the second and third periods Tuesday night juggling his lines, the head coach rolled out four new forward groupings Wednesday, notable mostly for breaking up Bo Horvat and Mat Barzal.
Horvat was put between Max Tsyplakov and Simon Holmstrom, and Barzal started on the left side of Brock Nelson, with Kyle Palmieri on the right. Hudson Fasching moved up to the third line with Anders Lee and Jean-Gabriel Pageau, and Casey Cizikas went down to the fourth line alongside Kyle MacLean and Matt Martin, who drew back in for Pierre Engvall.
“There’s moments that sometimes it’s good to change something,” Roy said before the game about the possibility of splitting Nos. 13 and 14 — a rarity since Horvat arrived on Long Island. “You eat chicken every night, sometimes it’s not as fun. Maybe you need some sauce.”
The sauce, however, did not change the tenor of the meal for the Islanders, which is still missing a key ingredient: goals.
The lines appeared to take some time to get on the same page, with the Islanders recording just five shots in the first period while a goalie interference call wiped out what appeared to be an opening goal for Severson.
So Roy changed them again entering the second, putting Barzal and Horvat back together with Tsyplakov on their left, flipping Fasching and Cizikas, and putting Holmstrom on the second line with Nelson and Palmieri.
That got the Islanders a few more chances — Tsyplakov had a look at what appeared to be an open net, and the Nelson line produced a long offensive zone shift with Elvis Merzlikins losing his stick — but no goals, and whatever momentum was produced faded quickly in the third.
The strugglers are in part due to injuries, but those are just one factor of many.
They can’t heal Anthony Duclair or Alexander Romanov, but the Islanders’ top brass — Roy and Lou Lamoriello — need to come up with a fix soon. Otherwise the Islanders will be staring at another steep climb into playoff contention.