Islanders need stars to step up before season spirals out of control

For six long weeks, the Islanders’ plan amounted to waiting for their injured stars to get healthy.The thought was if they could stick around NHL .500, on the periphery of the playoff race, then the pending returns of Mathew Barzal, Anthony Duclair and Adam Pelech would surely vault them above the mushy middle of the Eastern Conference and into the postseason.For one night — when Duclair returned Dec.21 and the Islanders played their best game of the season, thrashing the Maple Leafs, 6-3 — it looked like there might be some credence to that theory.That was one night.Duclair, in five games since returning to the lineup, has one goal and two assists and has rarely impacted games.Barzal, in seven games since returning, has one goal (into an empty net) and two assists, with flashes of his usual skill interspersed by long periods where he’s been invisible.The Islanders, in those seven games — Pelech returned on the same day as Barzal — are 2-5-0, with another match against the Maple Leafs coming up at UBS Arena on Thursday.There is plenty of blame to go around here for a month in which the Islanders’ playoff chances have dwindled massively, but with the exception of Bo Horvat, none of the club’s stars have played like stars.Barzal and Duclair, at least, have the excuse of coming back from injury, and it does normally take players a few weeks of playing to get their cardio completely back.

(This, interestingly, was never factored into the whole idea that the Islanders just needed to get healthy).Ilya Sorokin, who has been given a heavy workload with Semyon Varlamov still hurt and is struggling to deal with it, does not.He has let up three or more goals in all but one of his past seven starts with an .853 save percentage throughout.Coach Patrick Roy’s management of the Islanders net deserves some scrutiny after Marcus Hogberg — finally given a chance to play in Pittsburgh on Sunday — looked more than competent, but Sorokin is the fourth-highest-pai...