In Elmont, the New York Islanders lost their sixth straight game on Wednesday night, this time, 2-1, to the Ottawa Senators.
Anton Forsberg made 21 saves and was credited with the win, after starter, Cam Talbot went down with an apparent lower-body injury near the midway point of the second period.
“I thought we played well,” Forsberg said. “I thought we fought hard all game for this team. We just stayed with it the whole game and I think that’s the biggest part. I think that’s what we have to do moving forward here to get some more wins.”
Talbot had made 14 saves.
“We’ll know more tomorrow, but certainly it looks like he won’t be available before the [All-Star] break,” Senators coach D.J. Smith said.
The Senators improved to 21-23-3.
Ottawa took a 1-0 lead in the first period on a strike from Shane Pinto at 15:48.
“I thought we played good defense,” Pinto said. “The last couple days we harped on that. I thought we played fast and just thought we played a good game.”
In the middle frame, Claude Giroux scored his 16th of the campaign to push the Ottawa lead to 2-0; the goal came at 3:28.
“There was a lot of frustration after the Winnipeg game, the way we were playing,” Giroux said of the 5-1 loss to the Jets on Saturday. “I think we had a couple good practices and a couple good meetings to get back on the same page, and it was a way better effort tonight.”
The Islanders dropped to 23-22-5.
“We battled. You can’t take that away,” New York forward Casey Cizikas said. “We battled hard. We worked. It’s just unfortunate. We’ve got to find a way to win these games. It’s definitely tough, but we’ve got to dig deep. We’ve just got to find a way.”
Brock Nelson scored the Isles lone goal at 16:07 of the second period, but that was close as New York would get.
“I thought as the game went on we started to take the game over a little bit, but we just couldn’t find the back of the net,” New York coach Lane Lambert said.
New York is 0-4-2 in their last six games, and 1-7-3 in their last 11.
Semyon Varlamov made 36 saves in the New York loss.
“[Varlamov] played really well and we didn’t help him out,” Nelson said.
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