As good as the Islanders have been over their last 12 games, as much as it is impossible to win every time they take the ice, each loss in a playoff race this close seems to bear the emotional weight of multiple victories.

The Islanders are 7-2-3 in since Jan. 27, good enough to have changed their playoff math equation from bad to something near manageable, but a 3-2 loss to the Kings on Friday to split a two-game homestand leaves a bitter taste nonetheless. The Isles now head out on a two-game trip to Winnipeg and Minnesota needing to recover some momentum, and recover it quickly.

In the first two games without Mat Barzal, the Isles managed to eke out victories via leaning on their defense, along with Ilya Sorokin. On Friday, they missed Barzal’s offensive punch and could not quite find a way to make up for it on the other end, getting badly outshot by the Kings.

Early in the night, it looked like the Isles might be able to bog the Kings down into a low-event contest. But the dam broke in a badly lopsided second period, with the Kings scoring three times in a six-minute span to take a prohibitive lead.

Phillip Danault was the first to get on the board, getting on his own rebound after deflecting a Viktor Arvidsson shot at 6:40. Then, after Sebastian Aho failed to corral a puck at the blue line, it sprung Rasmus Kupari and Arthur Kaliyev for a two-on-one, which the latter converted less than two minutes later. At 12:14, Gabe Vilardi put the icing on the cake with a floating shot that beat Sorokin through traffic.

For too much of this game, the Islanders looked out of gas and out of ideas offensively. Noah Dobson’s power play one-timer got them on the board at 16:34 of the second and injected some life into a crowd that was growing restless, but despite their first goal on the man advantage since Barzal’s injury, the Isles couldn’t gain any momentum in the ensuing shifts. Adam Pelech scored a flukey goal off Matt Roy’s skate to pull within one with just under five minutes to go, but it came as too little, too late. Even at six-on-five, the Isles couldn’t generate enough.

Whether as a result of the Kings’ defense or their own depletion offensively, the Islanders looked for too much of the 60 minutes like a team that was missing a spark. It felt a little bit like they ran into the wall of what their reality without Barzal could look like.

Aho, in particular, had a rough night. Not only did his mistake lead to Kaliyev’s goal but perhaps more concerning, he turned the puck over in his own zone with a bad pass more than once — the sort of mistake he seemed to have cut out of his game earlier in the season. 

This was not, though, a couple players having a bad night at the wrong time. Even at their best the Islanders are not a high-scoring team and they’ve never been great at transitioning the puck, but it was hard to watch them at five-on-five for long stretches on Friday. Against a struggling goaltender in Jonathan Quick, the Islanders just couldn’t get enough clear looks at the net.

To keep perspective, the Isles have managed the last month, including the games without Barzal, about as well as can be expected. Their playoff outlook looks better than it did a week ago, and not insignificantly so. But the math — especially those pesky games in hand — requires that they refuse to let up with 20 games left in the season.

It does not matter who is injured, it does not matter how well they played last week. One loss might happen but it cannot turn into a string of them. Not if the season is to extend past April 12.