BOSTON — The chants came only from a pocket of fans at UBS Arena on Tuesday night, but they were loud enough to hear above the din of skates on ice and sticks on pucks.
“Lou Must Go,” it went — as in Islanders president and general manager Lou Lamoriello, who has gone from consecutive GM of the Year Award-winner to the target of the fan base’s ire.
The anger at Lamoriello has been constant on social media for some time and reached the Islanders’ home arena during the 4-2 loss to the Wild.
But it has not reached the Islanders’ dressing room.
Or come particularly close to doing so.
“It’s silly,” Mat Barzal told The Post of the chants. “That’s silly.”
Lamoriello, who turned 81 last month, has held his current role with the Islanders since the summer of 2018.
He has overseen the group’s transition to two-time conference finalists and to UBS Arena, where the results have been disappointing for the last two seasons.
In that time, the overarching criticism of management is for largely sticking by a group that has not shown itself to be a Stanley Cup contender since reaching the 2021 Eastern final.
Lamoriello dealt for Bo Horvat and Pierre Engvall ahead of last year’s trade deadline, beefing up the Islanders enough to make the playoffs, but was mostly quiet in free agency last summer.
The result so far has been a 5-3-3 record through the season’s first 11 games, with the Islanders showing a penchant for blowing leads and having lost three of four games heading into Thursday’s game in Boston.
“Lou is the man,” Barzal said. “He always has this team and this organization’s best interest [in mind]. I have a lot of faith in him and this group does, too. That’s just silly.”
Barzal is far from the only Islander who found even the concept of faulting Lamoriello at this point in the season to be misguided.
If anything, that is representative of the overarching sentiment in the dressing room.
“Everyone’s welcome to their opinion but I don’t think we’re in a position for that,” Ryan Pulock told The Post. “I think, sure we’ve maybe given up a couple games that we should’ve won. But I think our record’s still in an OK spot.
“We know we have to be better. We know we have to win some more games. But we’re confident in this group. We know that this group can get it done. I think from management, coaching staff to players, everyone’s on the same page and everyone’s confident in what we do here.”
In short, the Islanders are confident they can get back on the winning side of the ledger.
And to the extent they’re doling out blame right now, it’s on themselves — not at management.
That was evident during an intense practice Wednesday before the team departed for Boston, with coach Lane Lambert stressing defensive-zone positioning and aggressiveness.
At one point, Lambert seemed to remind his defensemen that they are not the goaltender.
The problem, according to the players and Lambert, is rooted in failures to stay tight in the defensive zone and play the style of hockey that has resulted in previous successes.
Lamoriello, in other words, has no part in it.
And things will have to get a lot worse before the sentiment in the loudest portions of the fan base is reflected in the dressing room.
“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, I guess,” Cal Clutterbuck said. “It’s up to them whether they want to scream from the rooftops or keep it to themselves. I don’t really care. They paid for their ticket, they wanna say what they wanna say. That’s what it is.”
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