Islanders falter against Canucks for third straight loss down the stretch

The stakes on Wednesday night were aptly laid out by Hudson Fasching after the Islanders finished their morning skate. “For a while, we’ve been telling ourselves, ‘Hey, we’re not out of this, we’re not out of this,’” Fasching said.“Now it’s like, all right, we’re officially in this now.” Yes they are, and Wednesday was when the Islanders could have finally laid down a long-awaited symbolic marker in this playoff race, with the team knowing ahead of time that a win would — at least temporarily — put them above the Canadiens for the last wild-card spot in the East. The Islanders are so close.

After Wednesday’s game, it feels like they are so far away. The 5-2 loss to the Canucks to close a good-not-great homestand, with Ilya Sorokin getting pulled after allowing four goals on 19 shots, means that the Islanders did not get the mental boost of waking up Thursday to see themselves in a playoff spot.More concerning, it means the Islanders have now dropped three straight games, and while two of those came in overtime, that is far from what anyone wants this time of year. Comparatively speaking, it is of some help that every other team in the chase is going through it right now.

The Islanders are not being judged against the almighty, they are being judged against Montreal, the Rangers, Columbus and Detroit. At an earlier point in the season, Wednesday’s loss would have been easily hand-waved.The Islanders played well for long stretches in the first two periods of this game, they ran into a red-hot Thatcher Demko in Vancouver’s net and couldn’t recover momentum after the Canucks got things rolling. But this is Game 71 of the season, and no one cares if you ran into a hot goalie.More than that, as well as Demko played, the Islanders can look to themselves for failing to find the right play on a number of odd-man rushes in this one, and for losing hold of the game after taking a 2-1 lead in the second. In his first game at UBS sinc...