Islanders’ line blender pays off in dominant home-opener win over Devils

It’s nights like these, where Matthew Schaefer is flying and the crowd is booming and the power play is actually functioning, where you can see the vision. All that promise. All that passion. 

The Islanders, for much of training camp, looked like a team that is still on its way to the launchpad. Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. Two games isn’t much to judge on, and one rollicking home opener even less. 

What Saturday night’s 6-0 win over the Devils in front of a sellout crowd does affirm is that there is so much potential, even if the bigger-picture timeline is unclear. Everyone knows that, of course, but stating it like a slogan in preseason is a different thing from seeing it play out in the regular season. 

How many nights like this can the Islanders have this year? Put away the question for the time being and focus on Saturday. 

The line blender on which Pete DeBoer hit puree after Wednesday night turned up something good. Simon Holmstrom, JG Pageau and Anthony Duclair fit like a glove. Emil Heineman complemented Bo Horvat and Kyle Palmieri well. Ondrej Palat, quietly, has had an excellent start to the season on a resurgent fourth line, and Victor Eklund never looked out of place in the top six. 

Not only that, but the Swedish rookie was one fight off a Gordie Howe hat trick, scoring his first NHL goal on his 20th birthday, fighting to get to the net to bury one past Nico Daws with his family on hand. 

That, at 11:32 of the third, made it 4-0, and before the crowd had started to chant Eklund’s name, Palat had made it five. For good measure, a shorthanded goal from Cizikas in the waning minutes extended the lead to six. 

The Islanders were equal to the speed and physicality of a Devils side that figures to challenge for the Metropolitan Division. They got to the net and it paid off against a shaky Daws. 

Schaefer, who drew the biggest cheer of introductions and heard his name chanted by the UBS crowd within 90 seconds of puck drop, set up two of the Islanders’ three second-period goals, breaking the game open with a superb piece of hand-eye coordination. Schaefer swatted the puck out of the air to keep it in and then sent a cross-ice pass to Bo Horvat below the right dot to make it 3-0 12:08 into the third. 

It was Horvat’s 100th goal with the Islanders, his 200th point with the Islanders and the first power-play goal of the season for a club that desperately needs a 5-on-4 boost. Indeed, after a miserable first outing, the Islanders power-play units threatened repeatedly before Horvat finally hit pay dirt. 

Before that, Eklund notched his first assist of the season after snagging Schaefer’s rebound off the boards and feeding Brayden Schenn from just behind the net. 

That doubled a lead which Holmstrom had opened at 3:32 of the second, finishing a rush with Pageau to score the year’s first goal at UBS. 

The Devils couldn’t say they were terribly outplayed. The match was up and down for stretches, with high-danger chances and expected goals close to even for much of the night. Ilya Sorokin, who finished a 37-save shutout, was a difference-maker, especially on the penalty kill, but the Islanders never left him to fend for himself. 

The defense pairs that took too long to settle into the opener were much cleaner here, if still not perfect. For Alexander Romanov and Ryan Pulock especially, this was the best they’ve looked across the preseason and two regular-season games. 

The same is true, and by some margin, of the Islanders as a whole. And it’s hard to have picked a better night for it.