The Islanders’ playoff push is for real.
Facing one of the best teams in hockey with a chance to win three straight for the first time since December, the Islanders not only took two points, but produced an emphatic and excellent 5-1 victory over the Bruins on the back of a first-period natural hat trick from Kyle Palmieri.
The transformation of the Isles under Patrick Roy took time, but Saturday — if it proves sustainable — looked like a formidable product.
All four of the forward lines forechecked, played below the hash marks and spent time in the offensive zone.
The Islanders — a team that is consistently criticized for lack of speed — played just as quickly as the Bruins.
They crashed the net. The penalty kill did not cave in.
On an all-around basis, it qualified as the best 60 minutes of the season by a country mile as the Islanders kept pace in the Metropolitan division standings with Philadelphia, which beat Ottawa.
Palmeri’s hat trick, the fastest to start a game in Islanders history and their first of the season, started 3:32 into the match when he beat Linus Ullmark off the rush.
Just less than two minutes later, following James van Riemsdyk’s penalty for holding, Palmieri banged in a rebound from Bo Horvat to make it 2-0.
Then at the 12:19 mark, he was at the net again to clean up Ryan Pulock’s initial shot.
It was the first hat trick by an Islander in the first period since Jason Blake on Feb. 27, 2007, against Philadelphia, and the first for Palmieri since Oct. 30, 2019, when he was with the Devils.
And Palmieri was not done yet, notching his fourth point of the night just 46 seconds into the second period when Anders Lee finished an odd-man rush by scoring off his own rebound.
If there were lingering nightmares of the collapses that have been commonplace for the Islanders at points this season, if anyone at UBS Arena did not feel safe from there, they surely did when Brock Nelson scored to make it 5-0 later in the second.
This was a night when even the bad moments could be quickly revised.
Palmieri went down with 13:26 to go in the second after a hit from Parker Wotherspoon, but returned to the game by the end of the period.
Marc McLaughlin ended Ilya Sorokin’s shutout in the second period, but the Bruins went to the intermission with just 14 shots on net — a reflection of how the Isles shut down nearly every opportunity and won nearly every puck battle.
A perfect game may have been out of reach. But this was not far off.
The Islanders still have a long way to go before they are on the right side of the playoff cutline.
But if any small notion of selling at the trade deadline was in the back of general manager Lou Lamoriello’s mind, it is surely gone now.
The Islanders cannot take their foot off the gas now. But their confidence, which Roy said just last week he wanted to improve, appears to be snowballing.
At the right time, with the right lines, with the right coach, the Islanders finally appear to be getting hot.
Not a moment too soon.
This article was originally published by a nypost.com . Read the Original article here. .
