Islanders, Ilya Sorokin Hold Off Stars To Improve Playoffs Chances

The Islanders seemed to run the gamut Thursday, playing one of those games that showed all the reasons they could be a dangerous playoff team and all the reasons they might not make the tournament — all at once.

At the end of it, they had a 2-1 win over the Stars that did indeed inch them above the playoff cutline at the close of business, and yet another point of evidence in Ilya Sorokin’s Vezina Trophy campaign.

There have been games, plenty of them, in which Sorokin was leaned upon more heavily than he was Thursday and in which Sorokin’s teammates did far less for him than they did Thursday.

After the Islanders prevented anything from going on goal after Matt Duchene got Dallas within 2-1 with 2:59 to go, blocking four shots in the final 53 seconds, Sorokin joked that he owed his teammates dinner.

Really, though, this night, like so many others, came down to the goaltender, whose 26 saves and total command of his crease were decisive in a game his team needed.

“At this point, we’re not really surprised,” Simon Holmstrom said. “He’s proven night in and night out that he’s by far the best goalie in the league.”

This was a low-event match in which the Islanders were pushed repeatedly and stood up to the test. They were far from perfect — the power play still frustrating, the breakouts still a challenge for stretches — but the way they held a lead for 55 minutes while rarely allowing Dallas to build momentum shift over shift counted as something to build on. So too did their work in killing off two penalties against the league’s second-ranked power play.

“Sometimes it might not be pretty the whole time,” Ryan Pulock said after skating 20:53 in his return from a lower-body injury. “You just gotta work through it. I thought tonight we did a lot of that. Important blocks, important times of getting the puck out, getting the puck in. I thought the forecheck at times was really good, created a lot for us.”

Bo Horvat’s 30th goal of the season, his second time in three seasons hitting that mark with the Islanders, was the difference heading into the third, with Sorokin’s heroics having kept the Stars from tying it on the power play midway through the second.

The Islanders, though, were not going to win this game by sitting on a 1-0 lead for 55 minutes, and of course it was the kids who have defined this season who made sure they would not.

Matthew Schaefer made a brilliant heads up play 2:19 into the third, throwing the puck into traffic in front of the net, where it banked off Cal Ritchie’s skate and past Jake Oettinger to make it 2-0.

It was a second straight match in which Ritchie has scored using his body in front of the net, and a second straight match in which Schaefer has missed out on tying the rookie record for goals by a defenseman due to an assist on a puck redirected in front. The 18-year-old, needless to say, will happily take it.

Sorokin was 2:59 away from a franchise record-setting eighth shutout this season when Duchene beat him at six-on-five to pull the Stars within one for the lone blemish on his night. Otherwise, there was no beating him.

There was the backdoor stop on Duchene, the Miro Heiskanen shot he got high in his crease to defend, the two Dallas power plays where he was the Islanders’ best penalty killer.

“Everyone understood it’s a big moment in the season,” Sorokin said. “Everybody knows what we should do. Every game is like the last game. But in the end, we should enjoy the game. If we enjoy the game, we show our best game.”

The Islanders enter a crucial — is it redundant to use that word when it applies to every game? — stretch of three games in four days, beginning Saturday against Florida, that includes a massive Monday night home match against the Penguins. Their superpower this season is the way they have avoided any kind of spiral, with their longest losing streak being three games and back-to-back losses a rarity.

It was on display Thursday, two days after a dispiriting loss to the Blackhawks.

“It was hard to sleep, I will admit,” coach Patrick Roy said. “It was pretty quiet in my car going home that night. But after that, you put it behind [you].”

The Islanders followed that example to a T.