The Islanders finally seemed to overcome their third-period demons on the road when they overcame a last-gasp goal by the Hurricanes to win in overtime and locked down a lead late in the game against the Panthers.
So it is all the more confounding that those issues came back in vogue on Tuesday against San Jose, when the last-place Sharks stormed back from a 4-1 deficit to beat the Islanders 5-4 in overtime and send them into another tailspin of self-questioning and doubt.
“I think it’s always in the back of your mind a little bit,” Bo Horvat said following an optional practice Wednesday. “And it’s sad to say. It’s happened so many times this year, it’s hard not to think about when you’re going out there that it’s gonna happen again.”
Just how bad has it been?
The Islanders have been outscored 39-18 in the third period and overtime.
Not only that, but they have allowed opposing teams to tie the game 11 times in the third period after doing so just eight times all of last season, per team statistician Eric Hornick.
They have won just 10 games despite having led in 20 of them.
There is just one team in hockey that has spent less time per game trailing — and it is the Boston Bruins, who are only tied for the best record in the league.
It is utterly confusing that a team can so consistently struggle to hold down a lead, and it is the difference between the Islanders being in a dogfight for the wild card and competing with the Rangers for the lead in the Metropolitan Division.
“Been too many games where we should’ve closed out and found ways to win,” Noah Dobson said. “We’ve kinda found ways to lose instead.”
So how can they fix it?
“For me it’s just we gotta stay aggressive, be confident in our plays,” Scott Mayfield said. “Make sure we’re doing all the little details right. And I think some of that’s kinda slipped away here and there. And when a team has a push and you make a mistake, it ends up in a Grade-A scoring chance. Seems like those are going in right now.”
Staying aggressive with a lead is a common thread in the team’s messaging right now.
That’s something the Islanders seemed to be doing well on Tuesday when they entered the third period up 2-1 and pushed it to 4-1 with a shorthanded goal shortly followed by a power-play goal.
But they couldn’t sustain that level for long enough, which is all the more confusing given that shutting down teams in the third period used to be an area in which the Islanders excelled.
Right now, though, every mistake seems to snowball and every goal they allow feels like a precursor to the next one.
“I think we’re better when we’re aggressive,” coach Lane Lambert said. “When you give up leads or a couple bad things happen, human nature can be to back off a little bit. And that’s where we gotta get away from doing that and get back to being aggressive and we’ll be fine.”
As Lambert pointed out, the Islanders have points in nine of their last 10 games. But it’s hard to do a victory lap about that when their record over that stretch includes four overtime losses.
Things have gotten much better compared to a seven-game losing streak that spanned the first two weeks of November. And yet the Islanders are still far from maximizing their opportunities.
“We would like to have two points in a lot of those games, but we have a lot of confidence in one another,” Dobson said. “And we’ll find a way to start closing these out.”