NHL - Minnesota Wild @ New York Islanders 3-5 - Tuesday, February 02, 2016

For those who think the Wild should just unleash the hounds and go for the throat offensively, they should watch the New York Islanders’ back-breaking third goal en route to a 5-3 victory Tuesday night. Less than a minute after Jason Pominville, the most snakebit of the Wild’s multitude of snakebit players, tied the score 2-2 with 1 minute, 24 seconds left in the second period, the Wild, a team with 23 goals in 13 games last month, decided to get greedy.

With the Wild less than a minute from escaping a one-sided second period, defenseman Marco Scandella decided to jump into the play and Thomas Vanek tried to hit him backdoor. Brock Nelson picked off the pass, the Isles countered quickly, Scandella was caught, Vanek didn’t know who to pick up entering the defensive zone and Mikael Granlund olé’ed like a bullfighter as Nelson cut freely to the slot. Boom, 42 seconds after the tying goal, the Isles responded with the go-ahead goal with 41.5 seconds left in the period.

That reckless way to end the period had a lingering effect as Frans Nielsen and John Tavares scored 2:03 apart in the first 4:52 of the third period. The Wild, 3-8-3 in its past 14 and sitting in ninth in the West, went on to lose for the eighth time in nine games.

New York Islanders center Anders Lee (27) celebrates after scoring a goal on Minnesota Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk (40) during the second period of an NHL hockey game in New York, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016. Wild's Mikael Granlund is at center.

After firing a season-high 20 shots in the first period and getting the game’s first goal when Charlie Coyle extended his goal streak to a career-best four games, the Wild was outscored 2-0 and outshot 8-1 in the first 10 minutes of the second. Mikhail Grabovski and Edina’s Anders Lee scored 1:47 apart to give the Wild a 2-1 deficit.

In the last two periods, the Wild was outmuscled along the wall (Erik Haula was bumped off the puck before the first goal, Nino Niederreiter lost a board battle before the second) and in front of the net (Jonas Brodin didn’t touch Lee before Nielsen’s winner) and was done in by absent coverage time and again between the circles.

After the fifth goal, Dubnyk was pulled for the first time this season and the Wild was slain by a guy named Jean-Francois Berube, 24, who was playing his second NHL game. He made 40 saves for his first NHL win and became the latest of many backups or inexperienced goalies (names like Matt Murray, Carter Hutton, Connor Hellebuyck and Linus Ullmark) that have beaten the Wild the past six weeks. It was a disappointing first visit to the Isles’ new Barclays Center home for the Wild.

Wild Quotes

Devan Dubnyk: “We had a pretty good opportunity to go into the third in a good spot, the third goal was a pretty good example of things that we need to not let happen going forward here in order to put ourselves in good situations to win games. We scored a big goal late in the period. I think priority one should be making sure it stays that way.”
Mike Yeo: “Listen I’m not going to try to sugarcoat anything. We’re all in this together, but I would say that those guys are the guys definitely that are going to pull us out of it. That’s the group that’s done it in the past, so it’s not like there’s not any belief on our part that they can do it. And it’s not like we’re finger pointing at them that they’re the reason why we’re in this, but I just know that when you come out of this, it’s usually those guys that drag ya out of it. They’re going to have to drag awful hard because we’re in this pretty deep right now. It’s tough to fight the negative feelings, the negative emotions. Obviously we can be mad, but we have to make sure we put our heads in the right place.”
“Much of the second period, we put ourselves in some very tough spots. That was disappointing [battles in front of the net]. Unfortunately during this whole stretch, we’ve seen glimpses and parts of our games that are there and what happens when we do it, and then we’re just not strong enough to stay with it and do it and continue to do it. The result is unpleasant.”
“The losses keep piling up. What’s concerning is we’re finding different ways to lose hockey games, games that are there for us. We’ve got a great start, we grab the lead, that should be a game we are real tough to get it back from us. Every game has been something different. You look at the ways that we have lost games, there’s a number of plays that happen through a course of a hockey game that add up to the difference. The little winning plays, we’re not making them right now. This doesn’t even feel necessarily like other situations. I mean, we’re losing the games right now. It’s not like we’re playing really well and just getting unlucky. For the most part, we’ve had games and we’ve lost them, and that’s what we have to fix.”
Zack Parise: “They're all frustrating, it’s all tough. ... We need to start winning some games. We’re making it pretty tough on ourselves. Losing another one again makes it even tougher for us.”
Thomas Vanek: “The first 20, we played great. We had lots of energy. In between periods we talked that they were going to have a push and we had to keep on going and it wasn’t good enough. We had a ton of energy, we looked great and then all of a sudden we lost it.”
“Their third goal, that’s on me. It’s one of those plays I would like to have back. We had a ton of energy, we looked great and then all of a sudden we lost it.”

Notes

* 2 assists for Matt Dumba snapping a 14-game point drought
* 1 assist for Jason Zucker snapping a 35-game drought
* 1 goal, 1 assist and 8 shots for Nino Niederreiter. Niederreiter had two goals in the past 33 games.
* Granlund and Brodin minus-3, Scandella, Parise, Dumba, Vanek minus-2.