RALEIGH — It was as if the Mike Milbury era packed its bags, hopped in a time machine and got off here at the Lenovo Center some two decades in the future.
Thursday started with Mathew Barzal being made a healthy scratch as punishment for being late to the team bus. It continued with his anticipated replacement, top prospect Cal Ritchie, being unable to get from Bridgeport to Raleigh after his flight was reportedly canceled. It concluded with a mess of a performance as the Islanders dropped their third straight game, 6-2, to the Hurricanes — a fitting end to a shambolic 12-hour stretch.
David Rittich, who got the start in net on the front end of a back-to-back with Ilya Sorokin set to play Friday in Washington, let up a trio of goals on the first seven shots he saw, and the rest of his team wasn’t much better.
“I felt like the first couple goals we gave up shouldn’t even have been a shot on net,” coach Patrick Roy said. “So I’m not gonna throw rocks at the goalie, I’m not gonna blame the goalie one bit. We can’t be sloppy like we were.”
If scratching Barzal was meant to jolt the Islanders into focus, it did not work. The Islanders were lethargic defensively, they were poor with the puck, they could not sustain pressure over shifts. Even Matthew Schaefer, who scored a power-play goal in the first period, could not rescue this one, the rookie superstar struggling with Carolina’s physicality.
Within the game’s first 5:21, the Islanders allowed Bradley Nadeau to score his first career goal and allowed former teammate Mike Reilly to exact some revenge with a shorthanded goal. Neither was assisted, both came amid defensive breakdowns, both came on shots Rittich should have stopped.
“[Max Tsyplakov] a backhand up the middle, or a cross-pass on the power play and not covering the wraparound. It’s a team game,” Roy said. “We should not have gave up those shots, one bit.”
Jordan Martinook made it a trio of bad goals at the 10:21 mark of the first, cleaning up the garbage on Jordan Staal’s rebound.
Though Schaefer’s power-play goal later in the first appeared to crack the door open to a comeback, the Islanders never mustered the energy to make that seem realistic.
Andrei Svechnikov scores a goal on David Rittich during the third period of the Islanders’ 6-2 loss to the Hurricanes on Oct. 30, 2025. NHLI via Getty Images
After Jackson Blake made it a 4-1 game 1:51 into the third, Simon Holmstrom pulled the deficit back to two just past the halfway mark of the period. Eleven seconds later, Andrei Svechnikov turned on the jets, skated around Schaefer and scored, bringing the lead back to three.
Logan Stankoven added on more embarrassment by scoring Carolina’s sixth goal with 11 seconds left in regulation.
The blame for this one could go all around. Adam Pelech and Ryan Pulock were on the ice for two even-strength goals. Tsyplakov had one of his worst games as an NHLer. Tony DeAngelo was caught puck watching on the shorthanded goal. The forward group uniformly had a bad night, and using Casey Cizikas in Barzal’s spot on the top line went about as poorly as it could have.
On the ice from Long Island
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“I’ve got better. I think our team [has] got better,” Schaefer said. “We’ve got a lot better than that.”
The debacle surrounding Barzal and Ritchie served to make a bad situation worse. The Islanders scratching Barzal over his tardiness seemed to come from general manager Mathieu Darche, as coach Patrick Roy indicated when asked whether he was holding the team to his standard.
“No, it’s not my standard,” he said. “It’s the organization’s standard.”
Without an extra forward on hand in Raleigh, the club was left dependent on the weather in the Northeast for Ritchie to get down in time for a 7:30 p.m. puck drop.
The weather did not cooperate, with a number of flights from the Tri-State area being canceled throughout the afternoon, leaving the Isles with no choice but to play 11 forwards and seven defensemen, with Adam Boqvist jumping in on the fourth line and Cizikas taking Barzal’s spot in between Anthony Duclair and Kyle Palmieri.
Barzal is expected to play Friday in Washington, and it is unclear whether Ritchie will join the team there too.
Matthew Schaefer celebrates after scoring a first-period goal during the Islanders’ loss to the Hurricanes. James Guillory-Imagn Images
The Islanders wanted to send a message Thursday, and that they did.
But it may have cost them two points.