TORONTO — At the end of 2024, the Islanders got further away from playing playoff games in 2025.
It’s getting late early this season, and just two days after Patrick Roy questioned his team’s mental toughness, the Islanders’ resiliency did not appear suddenly replenished in this matinee in Toronto.
Rather, on a day when they played a relatively decent 60 minutes on the road, the Islanders just couldn’t get themselves over the hump in a tightly fought 3-1 loss to the Maple Leafs at Scotiabank Arena.
Under different circumstances, you could excuse this one away. Given the situation in which the Islanders find themselves, failing to get two points here feels like par for the course in a season where the best thing you can say so far is that at least the Islanders have not fallen apart in the same spectacular fashion as the Rangers.
“I thought we played a good game,” Roy said. “To be a great game, we have to win.”
A moral victory, at a time when the notion of such a thing is almost laughable.
The Islanders’ 14-17-7 record — five points behind Ottawa for the last playoff spot with two more games played than the Senators — paints an accurate picture of what they are right now, and it isn’t pretty.
And, as far as resiliency goes, it is less than ideal that the Islanders have gone 38 games with just one come-from-behind win while trailing in the third period.
So things did not bode well after Steven Lorentz’s goal late in the second meant the Leafs took a 2-1 lead into the last 20 minutes.
The Islanders possessed the puck a lot in the third period. But the needed push never really materialized in terms of actual pressure or chances, with Toronto keeping the Isles on the perimeter for much of the period.
Ironically, one of their better chances came on a Leafs power play, when Brock Nelson got free up the ice for a chance in alone on Joseph Woll, but the Toronto netminder denied him.
The penalty kill, at least, had a perfect day until John Tavares scored into an empty net, which qualifies as notable given how terrible it’s been this season.
This, however, ended up being a rare Islanders game that lacked third-period drama, with Noah Dobson’s tripping penalty in the final minute leading to Tavares’ game-sealing goal, after Roy pulled Ilya Sorokin for a defensive-zone draw with predictable results.
“We’re worried about just winning games and clawing ourselves back,” Nelson said when asked if it felt like the season was slipping away. “Not thinking about the opposite. We want to get off to a good start and obviously it’s a new year. We’ve been talking about getting on a roll, playing solid hockey and getting wins, clawing ourselves back in the mix.”
The Isles played a strong first period and held the Leafs without many chances, but it only took one for Toronto to get on the board, with William Nylander feeding David Kampf from behind the net 17:54 into the game — a goal for which Nelson blamed himself.
The Islanders recovered in the second period to put some pressure on Woll, and finally broke through when Noah Dobson’s cross-ice pass found Jean-Gabriel Pageau at the 11:59 mark. But just 16 seconds later, Lorentz got up the ice and around Scott Mayfield for a free look at Sorokin, which he promptly buried.
“You can easily sit here and get frustrated,” Dobson told The Post. “But no one’s gonna feel sorry for us, or we shouldn’t [for] ourselves. We gotta stick with it here. Put our head down, grind away and focus on getting the next one vs. Toronto [on Thursday] and go from there.”
Right now, this is a team that’s easy to play against — one that lets mistakes spiral and always seems one shift away from something going wrong. Even on a relatively good day Tuesday, the Isles never led, and produced all of three high-danger chances when needing a push in the last 20 minutes.
And the standings, which for so long painted a comforting picture in spite of the Islanders’ record, are starting to catch up to the results.