Call it a post-Christmas hangover. You lose 1-0 or 7-0, it's still a loss and you move on. That's how The Maven views last night's 7-0 blowout to the Penguins at UBS Arena.
Call it a post-Christmas hangover.
You lose 1-0 or 7-0, it's still a loss and you move on.
That's how The Maven views last night's 7-0 blowout to the Penguins at UBS Arena.
"My concern," said captain Anders Lee, "was our inability to stop the bleeding and have a response. To let it go to where it got is just not part of our DNA. It was that lack of the 'bite' to end that (route to a rout) is what's going to sit with us the next couple of days until we can rectify it."
This 2023-24 campaign is the "Season Of Blowouts" and it has affected the best of them. But that doesn't make this loss in front of an SRO home crowd allow anyone in Islanders Country feel anything but sad: players included.
"It was pretty ugly," summed up Brock Nelson. "For whatever reason, we were the team that wasn't ready. We felt a little unorganized and a little lost. It's unacceptable."
Interestingly, Mathew Barzal underlined Nelson's point even using the same significant word.
Barzal: "It's unacceptable to have this happen in our rink and in front of our (sellout) fans. It was a weird lull in the second period that cost us the game. We have a game (tomorrow) that we'll be ready for, and we'll put on a better show for our fans."
Nothing worked; not even a called time out by coach Lane Lambert when the score was 2-0 with plenty of comeback time -- half a game -- available for a rally. Alas, Lambert's wake-up call didn't work, and Ilya Sorokin faced 20 shots in the second period alone.
"He was left out to dry," Lambert lamented. "It was a poorly played second period (on our part). We gave up the interior far too easily. (It seemed as if) every time you turned around, the puck was in our net."
Pulling Sorokin during the puck deluge was on Lambert's mind, but he felt it wasn't the time to insert Semyon Varlamov, who eventually finished the out-of-reach match in the third period.
"They got a couple of free looks close to Ilya that we can't be giving up," added Barzal, "so we'll clean that up."
At today's practice -- as well as tomorrow's team meeting -- it will be imperative to examine the cause of how the contest exploded. After all, this was a 0-0 game through 6:44 of the second period.
That's when Rickard Rakell's goal broke the ice for Pitt and, in effect, opened the floodgates for the foe.
A pair of Jake Guentzel goals within a dozen seconds followed -- now 0-3. Then, Geno Malkin knocked home a pair in less than four minutes -- now 0-5.
When Radim Zohoma popped one at 17:13, it was 6-0 at the end of two.
The shots on goal in the middle frame favored the Visitors, 20-7, which says a lot about the rout but not everything.
As far as I know, there's no such thing as a "Dreaded Six-Goal Lead."
Let's face it, folks, the decimated Isles defense -- with Adam Pelech, Ryan Pulock, and Scott Mayfield all out -- was due for a puncturing, and that's what happened last night
What hurts is the pure and simple fact that the Penguins represent one of the teams New York has to beat for a playoff berth. The standings -- Isles being ahead of them now -- make it clear that Pittsburgh is beatable.
The Isles issue -- and it will be a key to the rest of the season -- is whether they can rebound from the overwhelming loss.
"It's all fixable," Lambert insisted in his post-game post-mortem. "We were not hard enough in our own zone, and that's not characteristic of us. We'll fix it and move on."
Tomorrow night (7:30) against the Capitals will be a good time to start the fixin', a feudin' and a fightin' -- for a victory!