In Elmont, the New York Islanders fell behind, 1-0, to the Boston Bruins on Thursday, tying the game in the middle frame and then posting three unanswered goals in the third period en route to a 4-1 win over the Bruins.
Taylor Hall scored his 11th of the season in the opening period to give Boston the lead.
“Like I’ve said before, I don’t care what their record is, they’re such a hard team to play against,” Hall said. “When they’re on, when they have four lines going like they did tonight, it’s a tough matchup. We have to realize that and know that it’s going to be a very hard game from start to finish. I don’t know if we played, if we rolled over the lines that we could tonight. We left a couple of points on the table for sure.”
Ilya Sorokin made 26 saves in the Isles win.
“‘Soroky,’ the first goal he’d probably want back, but he made some big saves, key saves when it was still 1-1,” Islanders head coach Barry Trotz said. “From that, we just got confidence. He’s such a good goaltender. We’re fortunate we have two good goaltenders (also Semyon Varlamov), and we responded.
“You get energy from the big save, you get energy from a big special teams stop or a goal, and we stuck with it. We stuck with it right until the end.”
New York snapped a three-game skid.
Brock Nelson hit for a goal and two points in the Islanders win.
Boston fell to 27-17-4.
“We were the better team in the first period; they’re at home and obviously have got a lot of pride,” Bruins head coach Bruce Cassidy said. “What happens a lot is if the home team doesn’t have a good first period, usually they’ll push in the second. We’ve addressed that. It happens to us a lot. … We’ve just got to be ready for it and execute. You’ve got to be able to execute at a level to sort of stem the pushes that they have.”
New York’s Jean-Gabriel Pageau tied the game, 1-1, in the middle frame.
Noah Dobson scored what proved to be the game-winner in the third period.
“Obviously, we got the results we wanted, and that’s the way we need to play in those tight games,” Dobson said. “We’ve got to find a way to get a big goal and then lock it down when we need to. It was a good effort in the third for sure.”
Mathew Barzal pushed the lead to 3-1 at 13:32 of the final frame.
New York improved to 18-20-6.
Nelson scored an empty-net goal to ice the win at 4-1.
Linus Ullmark made 25 saves in the Bruins loss.
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