Islanders are models of inconsistency on road trip

DENVER — If their recent pattern holds, the Islanders might not play the best of games when they continue their five-game road trip against the defending Stanley Cup champion Avalanche on Monday night at Ball Arena.

They’ve alternated good and bad performances in their past six games, and that frustrating inconsistency certainly has been on display in their 1-1-1 start to this trip. They tightened their defense in a 5-2 win over Pacific Division-leading Vegas on Saturday after a porous 5-4 loss to the struggling Coyotes the night before. But they battled the NHL-best Bruins from start to finish in Tuesday’s 4-3 shootout loss.

“That’s what we have to do,” coach Lane Lambert said of the urgency to string together strong games. “There’s really no reason for it not to be there. It’s a big game at kind of the end of this trip before we head back to the New York area. To come away with that win and be above .500 on a tough road trip like that, it’ll be a good thing.”

“We’d love to,” Zach Parise said. “There’s areas that I felt like we corrected from [Friday] night to [Saturday night]. Now the challenge is to repeat those. If you were to look at this segment of games as a whole, we’re playing some tough games in some tough buildings. We’d love to find that consistency of rolling two or three in a row and seeing that effort. It was at least a good way to start [against Vegas].”

The Islanders will conclude the road trip against the Rangers on Thursday at Madison Square Garden.

They did not practice on Sunday, so there were no updates or indications about the status of right wings Kyle Palmieri and Cal Clutterbuck, who both missed Saturday’s game with upper-body injuries suffered in the third period against the Coyotes on Friday.

However, the Islanders did recall Cory Schneider from their AHL affiliate in Bridgeport to back up Ilya Sorokin against the Avalanche. Varlamov took himself out against Vegas at 13:38 of the the period after making 35 saves. The Schneider move means Varlamov will not be available Tuesday.

The Avalanche entered Sunday’s play clinging to the final wild-card spot in the Western Conference, the same spot as the Islanders in the Eastern Conference.

Colorado has been beset by injuries and is 3-2-1 since Nathan MacKinnon suffered an upper-body injury. Fellow top scorer Gabriel Landeskog also is out long term after undergoing knee surgery.

But the Islanders are concentrating on their own game and trying to figure out why they haven’t played consistent hockey of late.

“That’s a good question,” Parise said. “To me it feels like the cleaner we can get out of our zone and up the ice with possession — I think everyone can say that, too — that’s when we’re a better team. Sometimes, if we get stuck in our zone turning the puck over, we can spend a lot of time. When we come up the ice clean together, we generally get a better result.”

By Andrew Gross

andrew.gross@newsday.comAGrossNewsday

Andrew Gross joined Newsday in 2018 to cover the Islanders. He began reporting on the NHL in 2003 and has previously covered the Rangers and Devils. Other assignments have included the Jets, St. John’s and MLB.