In Winnipeg, Bo Horvat scored a shorthanded goal in the first period to give the New York Islanders all the offense they would need on Sunday afternoon.
Semyon Varlamov made 23 saves in a 4-0 shutout of the Jets.
“Sometimes, it’s easy. Sometimes, it’s very, very hard,” Varlamov said. “I was very hungry to play today, so for me it wasn’t very hard to stay sharp.”
The Isles improved to 31-25-7.
“I thought the guys the last few games here have been playing with discipline in our structure and we’re making it difficult for teams to generate a little bit.” New York coach Lane Lambert said. “We came out of the gates well and only allowed one shot in the first period … [Winnipeg] may have had some struggles lately, but we just wanted to focus on our game.”
The Jets dropped to 35-24-1.
“We’ve talked about this all year — when things don’t go well and you’re not scoring, don’t look for that extra pass and don’t look for the perfect goal,” Winnipeg coach Rick Bowness said. “Just put it on the net. We had like 45 shot attempts after two periods; 15 missed the net and 15 were blocked. We need some of those to get through.”
Alexander Romanov scored in the second period to give the Islanders a 2-0 advantage.
“I thought our commitment level and our discipline, too, was very good tonight,” Lambert said. “We pushed forward, and we did a real good job of establishing our game.”
Brock Nelson pushed the lead to 3-0 at 18:41 of the middle frame.
“It was a good play,” Nelson said. “We weathered a little pressure in the D-zone. It was a nice play by Zach (Parise), got past (Jets defenseman Neal) Pionk and I cut to the middle (and shot).”
Adam Pelech added an empty-net goal with 2:01 left on the game clock.
“We gotta figure it out,” Jets forward Pierre-Luc Dubois said. “I, personally, individually, I don’t think it’s one guy that has the answer in here. It’s everybody together. It’s the coaching staff. We all gotta figure it out. You guys see it, we’re not playing good hockey right now. But at the same time, we can turn this around and turn it into a positive. We just gotta get going. Time’s running out.”
David Rittich made 20 saves in the Jets loss.
“We need to be better in the first periods, we need to be better off the start, and we can’t be a fragile team right now,” Jets defenseman Josh Morrissey said. “I’m not saying that we are, but we certainly can’t fall into that mode. We’re an aggressive team. We have to be able to make plays, make passes and not just panic because we’re going through a little bit of a rut. I thought we got better at that throughout the game.”
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