The New York Islanders had the kind of game Sunday night that feels salvageable right up until it isn’t. Through 40 minutes, they were right there with the Dallas Stars. By the end, the mistakes piled up, the defensive cracks widened, and Dallas walked away with a 6-3 win after scoring three unanswered goals in the third period.
That was the killer for New York. The Islanders answered Dallas twice in the first two periods and kept the game level entering the final frame, but the third period turned into a stretch of self-inflicted damage that the Stars made them pay for.
“That's a winnable game going into the third period, and we had some self-inflicted stuff tonight,” Islanders Head Coach Pete DeBoer said, via Tyler Brosious of NHL.com. “That's probably the most rush chances we've given up the entire year in one game.”
The loss ended a five-game point streak for New York, which had gone 3-0-2 during that run. And for much of the night, the Islanders looked capable of extending it. They absorbed the early punches, responded each time, and matched the Stars goal for goal over the first two periods.
Tyler Seguin opened the scoring for Dallas, but Matthew Schaefer answered with his second goal of the season. Before the Islanders could settle in, Jason Robertson beat Ilya Sorokin less than a minute later to restore the Stars’ lead.
The second period followed the same script. Kyle Palmieri tied it at 2-2, Justin Hryckowian put Dallas back in front, and then Brayden Schenn evened things up again with 2:25 left in the period.
After that, though, the game shifted hard in Dallas’ favor. Wyatt Johnson scored to start the third-period surge, Robertson added his second of the night, and Mikko Rantanen finished the scoring.
“We battled hard for two periods, but didn’t play a smart third period,” Schenn said. “We turned over too many pucks and let them come at us.”
Palmieri pointed to the same issue after the game, noting how quickly the Stars turned ordinary moments into danger the other way.
“They turned those loose pucks and those clean breakouts into odd-man rushes,” Palmieri said.
DeBoer’s message after the loss was blunt: the first two periods were encouraging, but against teams like Dallas, that kind of sloppiness gets exposed fast.
“Some stuff you have to clean up, and the lesson in that is we can't play that game against good teams,” DeBoer said.
The Islanders will try to reset Tuesday, Oct. 27, when they continue their three-game road trip against the Nashville Predators.
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