Some nights your goalie stands on his head and stuns an offense led by the most dangerous forward in the world, some afternoons you\u2019re down 4-0 before the other team has gotten its 12th shot.<\/p>\n
The Islanders lost 4-2 in Calgary despite outshooting and outchancing the Flames, though still making enough mistakes to do themselves in. They outshot the Flames in the first period 10-4, then gave up a second goal early in the second right after Jonathan Drouin missed a golden chance to tie it. The Flames added two more by the midway point to basically put the game out of reach.<\/p>\n
After Yan Kuznetsov made it 4-0, J-G Pageau did answer with a sizzler just 32 seconds later to open a little daylight. The building was still announcing Kuznetsov\u2019s goal, and few seemed to realize Pageau\u2019s shot scored.<\/p>\n
But overall, the Isles\u2019 chances were rarely dangerous enough, even after pulling David Rittich (15 saves on 19 shots) for a sixth attacker with eight minutes left to go, a stretch that included a power play to skate 6-on-4.<\/p>\n
Anders Lee added one consolation goal to reach the 300-goal milestone with three minutes left, while Dustin Wolf narrowly missed getting a goalie goal despite all that time and the fat lead to chase one.<\/p>\n
Overall, it just wasn\u2019t the Islanders\u2019 day, and it felt like a bit of Albertan karmic payback after they stole the two points in Edmonton a day and a half prior (not that aggrieved Oilers nor pleased Flames fans would see it that way).<\/p>\n
On this trip, the Islanders are stealing some games against better teams (Minnesota, Edmonton) and finding things difficult against weaker teams (Nashville, Winnipeg, Calgary), and that\u2019s probably just and fitting for a team whose higher-risk approach often turns on whether they\u2019re getting a great 60 minutes from their goalie.<\/p>\n
And the next weak team on the docket is Vancouver, where they\u2019ll meet the Canucks late Monday night.<\/p>\n
The Canucks are at the bottom of the league with just 37 points. Hell, they\u2019re even worse than the Rangers\u2026someone in British Columbia should write a strongly worded, poorly proofed letter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some nights your goalie stands on his head and stuns an offense led by the most dangerous forward…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5124],"tags":[26255,895,26,5294,896,5,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-413514","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-calgary-flames","8":"tag-bits-o-islanders-news","9":"tag-calgary","10":"tag-calgary-flames","11":"tag-calgaryflames","12":"tag-flames","13":"tag-hockey","14":"tag-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/115913380725180795","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}