The Islanders were well on their way to proving their mettle by scoring a first win this season over a playoff team — and doing so against the team that knocked them out last year at that.
Instead, all they proved was that they cannot protect a multi-goal lead at home.
For the fourth time in seven games at UBS Arena this season, they flushed one of those right down the toilet — and for the second time, it resulted in a bitterly disappointing loss as the Hurricanes came back to beat the Islanders 4-3, on Sebastian Aho’s overtime winner.
To make matters even worse than the overtime loss against Detroit last week, the blown lead this time was 3-0.
It did not take long after the Islanders opened up that lead for Carolina to start chipping away at it.
Jalen Chatfield pulled the Hurricanes back to 3-1 at 8:18 of the second, barely 30 seconds after Mathew Barzal scored on a breakaway for the Islanders.
That set up a total collapse in the third period.
The Islanders defended well enough for a while.
But Dmitry Orlov finally broke through with 7:41 to go in the game, getting Ilya Sorokin to go the wrong way on a shot from the top of the offensive zone.
Without Adam Pelech — missing this game due to injury — and with an already-hairy record when defending leads on home ice, that did not seem a particularly comfortable spot for the Islanders.
Indeed, it was not.
Jesperi Kotkaniemi tied the game at three on the Hurricanes’ 45th shot of the night at 15:26 of the final period.
And come overtime, the Islanders again failed in three-on-three play.
The Islanders can be happy about salvaging a point.
But it is farcical to suggest they should be happy with how they are playing after Carolina came into their building and doubled up their shot count — 48 to 24 — in regulation.
It’s not a surprise that the Islanders, now 5-2-3, are banking their identity on goaltending.
What is surprising is the extent to which they are doing so. It is living on the edge to an unsustainable extreme.
The Islanders seem happy not just to lean on Sorokin but to ask him to make around 40 saves a night — and on Saturday, well over 40 saves.
That can work on occasion.
But not over an 82-game season.
On Saturday, with Pelech out injured, the Islanders were again happy to sit back in their own zone, picking and choosing their spots to take offensive chances.
It worked for a while.
But not when it mattered.
A manic early part of the game for Barzal came to a head — in a good way — late in the first period.
Barzal found Noah Dobson with a no-look pass at the top of the zone and Dobson got all the way to the slot before roofing the puck on his backhand, giving the Islanders a 1-0 lead.
Simon Holmstrom doubled it by getting on the scoresheet for the second straight game, this time shorthanded as he buried a breakaway chance following a Barzal penalty at 4:11 of the second.
Then it was Barzal’s turn to put one in the back of the net, as he finished off Horvat’s feed a little over three minutes later.
But the Hurricanes were not going to lay down the way the Capitals had in a similar situation a couple nights earlier.
The last time they played in UBS Arena, Game 6 of the first round, they took advantage of the Islanders resting on their laurels in defending a 1-0 third period lead to come back and win in overtime.
If there were any lessons learned from that, it was not apparent here.
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