Overtime has been an all-too-familiar situation for the New York Islanders this season, and usually, they have wound up on the wrong side of it.
Twenty of their games had gone into an extra period or a shootout and they lost 14 of them — results that have been pivotal in the team’s current standing of being on the outside of the Eastern Conference playoff picture.
But on Monday night in overtime of a 2-2 game in Dallas against the Central Division-leading Stars and with New York having lost two straight and five of its last seven, All-Star winger Mathew Barzal took things into his own hands.
Receiving the puck in the defensive zone, he meandered through the neutral zone and into the Dallas Zone where his trademark skating ability allowed him to list around the attacking area for seven seconds.
In total, he had the puck on his stick for 11 uninterrupted seconds and it wound up with him feeding Bo Horvat in the slot for the game-winning, one-timer goal that delivered the Islanders a vital two points.
“It’s about time one went in there with all the chances we had tonight,” Horvat said (h/t Islanders official site).
Horvat had seven shots on goal in the victory, most of them coming on a new-look top line where head coach Patrick Roy promoted the team’s leading scorer, Brock Nelson, from second-line center to left-wing on the top unit to join Horvat and Barzal.
The trio combined to put 13 of the Islanders’ 28 shots that night on net with an abundance of early promise being shown.
“It was a little different. I tried not to think,” Nelson said. “You find yourself in some different spots, a little bit of a different look, but I just tried to read off Bo and Barzy — more so off Bo because we’re a little more interchangeable on the left side.”
The win moved the Islanders (62 points) to within five points of the Philadelphia Flyers, who possess the third and final non-wild-card playoff spot in the Metropolitan Division — a spot that a…
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