The New York Islanders put themselves behind too early \u2014 and couldn\u2019t recover.<\/p>\n
In a crucial Metropolitan Division matchup Friday night, the Islanders dropped a 4-1 decision to the Philadelphia Flyers at UBS Arena, extending their losing streak to three games at the worst possible time in the playoff race.<\/p>\n
The tone was set in a lopsided first period.<\/p>\n
New York was outshot 12-2 and struggled to generate any sustained pressure, while turnovers quickly turned into offense the other way. Owen Tippett opened the scoring off a rush following a giveaway, and Alex Bump added another less than two minutes later to make it 2-0 before the Islanders could settle in.<\/p>\n
Patrick Roy used his timeout in an attempt to reset his group, but the damage was already done.<\/p>\n
The Flyers extended the lead early in the second after another costly turnover, as Matvei Michkov capitalized to make it 3-0. The Islanders showed signs of life midway through the period when Jean-Gabriel Pageau finished a strong play from Mathew Barzal to cut the deficit to two.<\/p>\n
But that was as close as they would get.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was not even close to being enough effort by us tonight in a big hockey game, against a team that’s chasing us in the standings,\u201d Bo Horvat said. \u201cWe have to be a heck of a lot better than we were tonight all the way through.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite a more structured effort over the final 40 minutes \u2014 limiting chances and pushing the pace \u2014 New York couldn\u2019t solve Dan Vladar again. Travis Sanheim added a third-period goal to seal it.<\/p>\n
Ilya Sorokin made 17 saves in his 10th straight start, but like much of the past week, the Islanders left him with too much to handle early.<\/p>\n
After the game, Anders Lee pointed to the recurring issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a tough time to lose three in a row\u2026 our mistakes are killing us right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the standings tightening, the Islanders now face an urgent need to regroup \u2014 and fast. They head to Carolina to take on the Metro-leading Hurricanes on Saturday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The New York Islanders put themselves behind too early \u2014 and couldn\u2019t recover. In a crucial Metropolitan Division…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5112],"tags":[1468,5,4,1467,56,5205],"class_list":{"0":"post-540177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia-flyers","8":"tag-flyers","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-philadelphia","12":"tag-philadelphia-flyers","13":"tag-philadelphiaflyers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116346453307647751","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540177","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=540177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}