The Eastern Conference’s wild-card race to the bottom reached a heretofore unseen level of debauchery on Saturday when all four of Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit and the Islanders played and all four lost.
That meant in practice that the Capitals and Red Wings — fortunate enough to lose in shootouts as opposed to regulation — gained a point on the field, with Washington jumping the Flyers for third in the Metropolitan Division.
Surely this must be the only playoff race in the history of sports where losing can help your chances on any given night.
The self-defeating dynamic at play gives a whole new meaning to the Islanders’ match against the Flyers on Monday night at Wells Fargo Center.
Not only is it a game that carries a four-point swing in the standings, that could put the Islanders in mathematical control to finish ahead of Philadelphia, though not Detroit.
It is a game where at least one team in this morass of mediocrity is guaranteed to get two points.
Sadists might get a kick out of it.
Still, the possibility for some positive movement in the standings counts for a big deal when the woe in the field ranges from the Islanders’ 2-7-1 record over their last 10 to the Flyers and Red Wings both holding four-game losing streaks to the Capitals holding a negative-31 goal differential, third-worst in the Eastern Conference.
Someone has to make it.
And recent play aside — which, yes, is a weird thing to put aside in the context of a playoff race — there’s no reason it can’t be the Islanders.
Things have reached such a point over the last couple weeks that a 4-1 loss in Tampa on Saturday night in which they never looked likely to actually win the game was spun optimistically.
“What I liked is how we bounced back in that second and third,” coach Patrick Roy said. “That’s what I’m thinking [from] today’s game. It was a one-goal game [going into the third period]. … The difference is in the second period, we just couldn’t bear down on our chances. That’s how I see it.”
Meanwhile at the same time in Philadelphia, the Flyers were losing 5-1 to the Blackhawks, whose record is 31st-best in a league of 32 teams and there was no happy face being put on it.
“We sucked tonight,” Flyers coach John Tortorella lamented to reporters. “We didn’t execute. We didn’t make one play.”
So at least the Islanders might be the team that comes into Monday feeling better about itself.
If there is something to grasp onto in reality for the Islanders, and not just rhetorically, it is twofold.
First, Semyon Varlamov turned in an excellent performance in goal Saturday and could be in line to start a third straight game, with Roy saying afterwards he and goaltending coach Piero Greco had to discuss whether to go with Varlamov or Ilya Sorokin against the Flyers.
“If I was in position, I would feel good about myself,” Roy said. “I would go out there and say, yeah, I’ll be pissed that we lost. But he knows he played a strong game, he gave us a chance and as a goalie, that’s the mindset you have.”
Second, the forward lines Roy came up with during the second period were far more competitive than those he started the game with, even if they never broke through Andrei Vasilevskiy in Tampa’s net.
“I think we generated offense tonight,” Anders Lee said. “Could name quite a few opportunities that we had.”
As rhetorical exercises go, optimism is a hard sell for the Islanders to be stuck with.
But this is not exactly a playoff race that’s demanding excellence.
Beat the Flyers and the Islanders will have every chance to make it.
And once the second season starts, it does not matter how anyone got there.
