Islanders Loss To Predators Unimaginable But Not Indescribable

“No, you can’t,” Islanders head coach Lane Lambert said when asked by reporters in Nashville if he could imagine losing a game in such a fashion.

Islanders players summed up the emotion.

“It’s a kick in the nuts,” Anders Lee said. “That’s a bounce with seven seconds just kills.”

“That last one is just a [bad] bounce,” Kyle Palmieri said. “There’s nothing you can do there.”

With the Islanders up a goal late in the game, Palmieri took a tripping penalty that let the Predators back into the game.

Luke Evangelista scored with five seconds remaining on the Nashville power play, tying the score with a shot that made its way past a screened Sorokin. Juuso Parsinen scored the third and final goal of the night for the Predators on an empty net.

Sorokin ended the evening with 25 saves on 27 shots as he battled Nashville netminder Juuse Saros in a duel of former Vezina Trophy finalists.

Shot for shot, save for save, Sorokin and Saros matched each other all night as the Islanders and Predators played into the third period with both sides of the scoreboard reading zero. Eventually, it was Jean-Gabriel Pageau who broke the ice.

Standing in the slot with the blade of his stick serving as the perfect target for Noah Dobson’s slap pass, Pageau deflected a puck past Saros, breaking the scoreless tie 12 minutes into the first period.

Pageau’s fifth goal of the season came by way of Dobson’s fifth assist in his last two games.

Soon enough, though, the elation of the moment wore off as the Islanders went into another late-game tailspin.

“We turned the puck over and tried to go through the middle of the ice,” Lambert said. “It’s a cardinal sin in our zone. We turned the puck over, and they ended up getting a shot that broke a stick and alley-oops over. It was a calamity of errors.”

With the loss, the Islanders record drops to 19-13-10 as they’ve failed to beat the Predators in 10 straight meetings.

Altogether, Saturday night ended in the worst way imaginable for the Islanders and was also the worst way for them to begin their road trip.

The Islanders travel to Minnesota for a meeting with the Wild in the first half of a back-to-back set that concludes in Winnipeg the day after.