Three Takeaways: Islanders Mistakes Cost Them in Rematch with Rangers | NYHN+

The New York Islanders will want to forget about this game almost immediately.

The Islanders dropped Saturday’s rematch with the New York Rangers 5-0 at Madison Square Garden in a game that was the complete opposite of their first meeting on Thursday. The Isles gave almost no support to their rookie goaltender, Ilya Sorokin, and they played a sloppy 60-minutes.

Here are three takeaways from the Isles loss to the Rangers.

Mathew Barzal Takes O-Zone Penalties

On Thursday, Mathew Barzal made the takeaways for his positive play away from the puck. This time around it was because of the bad penalties he took throughout the night.

The Islanders star forward was called for a penalty on three different occasions in Saturday’s loss, including back to back penalties early in the second period. All three occurred in the offensive zone.

The Rangers didn’t capitalize on any of Barzal’s penalties, but it was a rough night for the Islander.

“It can’t happen,” Islanders head coach Barry Trotz said. “I need Barzy to an impact player and you never want to take penalties 200 feet from your net. I know he took a couple. Ross Johnston took. That can’t happen. That’s a sin to me.”

The Effort Just wasn’t the same

Was it the injury to Semyon Varlamov right before the game even started? Were the Rangers just that good?

Whatever the case was, the Islanders were just out of whack on Saturday in their shutout loss in Manhattan. They mustered just 23 shots on Alexander Georgiev and were limited in their scoring chances.

The Islanders didn’t register a single high danger scoring chance five-on-five, according to Natural Stat Trick. They had just four in all situations. The Rangers had 12 in all situations and six high danger chances while five-on-five.

And boy did the Islanders turnover the puck.

“We didn’t get to the high danger and then you commit eight penalties it takes a lot of steam,” Trotz said. “We didn’t get off to a good start. It was 2-0 and I felt like we were going to come out pretty good in the second period. We do, we ring one off the post off a faceoff, and then seconds later we take a penalty and then we come out and take another penalty. … Any momentum that we would have got early in that second period to get ourselves back in the game we sort of shot ourselves in the foot.

“One of the worst managed games by our group in terms of our whole game.”

Casey Cizikas did try to put a little bit of a positive spin on the number of penalties the Islanders took. While they took a high volume of penalties, they only allowed one power-play goal and the penalty kill unit got to get a few reps in.

“It’s definitely not ideal to take eight penalties in a game, but there is positives that you can take away from that,” Cizikas said. “I thought we did a good job of winning faceoffs and getting the pucks down. … I thought we did a good job of keeping them to the outside.”

Noah Dobson struggled

It was another example of playing really well one night and not so the next. Noah Dobson had a tough time against the New York Rangers on Saturday.

One example of that was the Rangers’ first goal of the night. Dobson played the puck as it came out of the zone, but struggled to gain a handle on it and then Mika Zibanejad forced the turnover in neutral ice, which led to the goal.

Dobson only played 14:12 in the Islanders’ second game of the season and finished the game a minus-2. Trotz wasn’t worried about the rough outing and said that he’s going to have to just put it out of his mind.

“It wasn’t his best game and he has to move forward,” Trotz said. “He’s going to be a big piece of our success and you’re not always going to have your best day, and it wasn’t one of his, unfortunately. He’s a young player and pucks are bouncing. He got jammed on the one. I think Ross Johnston kind of handcuffed him. It went into the linesman and then he got handcuffed and then they were able to score there.

“Not all on him and this is a team loss for me.”