Islanders still desperately searching for fix to woeful power play with time running out
TAMPA — It’s nearly April, with three weeks to go in the regular season and 11 games left in the Islanders’ season.Teams are what they are.There’s no magic fix coming, no trade deadline to look forward to.The odds the Islanders find some kind of magic bullet for their no good, very bad, terrible power play are next to nil.
But can they at least get this thing functioning, hit the bare minimum where it doesn’t cause stomachs to tighten every time a penalty is called against an opposing team, which, remember, is supposed to be a good thing?That’s the question right now, with the Islanders having scored on the power play in just one of their last nine games, the struggling five-on-four units having been a major factor in their last two losses to Columbus and Vancouver, respectively.It’s not for lack of trying.Chunks of practice time have been devoted to the power play, including on Friday.
Adam Boqvist is set to replace Mike Reilly in the lineup against the Lightning on Saturday afternoon, a move coach Patrick Roy said was “only power-play-related.”What else to expect after Roy sounded resigned Wednesday night about the power play after it failed to generate on a pair of third-period chances that could have gotten the Islanders back into the game against the Canucks?“Not really,” he said, asked if anything had been better than two nights prior.“We had a chance.
[Noah Dobson] missed the net on that one, on the breakout.But no, we didn’t generate much on the power play.”He has talked frequently about puck retrieval, tried to be optimistic that when the Islanders actually get set up in the offensive zone, they look sort of fine.
It’s just a matter of getting that far, which has proven a constant challenge.“We worked on it today.It’s not going to be pretty every time you enter the zone, not going to be perfect,” Bo Horvat told The Post on Friday.
“To go and support and help each other in the battles, I think is going to be our big...