Say this for Pete DeBoer’s Islanders: They are not playing down to their opposition.
It wasn’t as easy as their win over the Blackhawks that started this homestand, but the Islanders ended it by taking care of business with a 3-2 victory over the Canucks on Tuesday night, with a pair of goals from Kyle Palmieri pulling them back to .500.
“We went into that third period knowing the recipe, and I think we put a ton of pressure on them in the third,” Palmieri said. “ … I thought as a team we went out there and every line was rolling and tilting the ice in our favor.”
DeBoer’s team played structured and effective hockey, surviving a shaky second period to regain control in the decisive third. That is as it should be against Vancouver, which has won just two of its first eight games and looks set for a miserable season.
A hallmark of Islanders teams in recent years, though, has been struggling to put away or routinely beat teams just like that. The Islanders, for better or worse, had a tendency to play to their opponent’s level.
At least so far this year — and this is where the obligatory “it’s early” caveat goes — that hasn’t been the case. Which, if DeBoer can turn it into a hallmark, will be critical to keeping the Islanders in the playoff race.
This wasn’t a perfect 60 minutes, but the third period was as clinical of hockey as the Islanders have played this season. They did, though, have to survive the second to get there. Max Sasson seemed to zap the Islanders’ momentum at 7:52 of the second, cutting a 2-0 lead in half by blasting a rolling puck past Ilya Sorokin.
Suddenly, the Islanders were losing battles, they were on their heels and you could feel the equalizer coming as soon as Palmieri tripped Liam Ohrgren late in the second. Not only did Brock Boeser tie it up with a one-timer from the slot, but the Islanders ended the second with another needless penalty after Tony DeAngelo took exception to a Sasson check that came after the horn.
It was a gut-check moment for a team whose habit in the past would have been to let things spiral from there. Instead, they killed off DeAngelo’s penalty and — sparked, unsurprisingly, by Matthew Schaefer — found their game again.
“We learned through the first two periods what worked for us, what didn’t,” DeBoer said. “And then the third, we deserved to win that game with how we played in the third period.”
Twice in the third period’s first six minutes, Schaefer’s play with the puck led to extended pressure in the Canucks’ zone. On the second of those, after Schaefer had two shots saved, Palmieri got one to go for his second goal of the evening.
After the top line had gone scoreless through the season’s first five games, getting two goals from it at 5-on-5 — the second of which came after Matias Maccelli swapped places with Emil Heineman amid a superb evening from Maccelli — is just what the Islanders needed.
For the remainder, they were relentless in possession, their retrievals and forechecking near-dominant at points. Right when the Canucks started to push with a few minutes to go, and looked ready to pull Leevi Merilainen, Heineman drew a penalty on Zeev Buium that kept the Islanders in the driver’s seat when they should have been frantically defending at 5-on-6.
“I’ve always believed the best defense when you have a lead is to keep the puck in the other team’s end,” DeBoer said. “They can’t score from 200 feet away. So I think that was our goal and I actually liked our grind in the third period.”
“We spent a lot of time in the other team’s end. We didn’t throw pucks away. We weren’t impatient.”
Maccelli had driven play early in the night as part of a fourth line with Casey Cizikas and Simon Holmstrom — who moved down from the third line, swapping places with Ondrej Palat. At 15:50 of a dominant first for the Islanders, Maccelli ripped one from the left circle for the 2-0 goal, the feed coming from Schaefer.
“You finally see one go in, it boosts your confidence. Puck just all of a sudden starts following you out there,” Maccelli said. “It feels really good.”
That was just 53 seconds after the Islanders had scored first on Palmieri’s tip-in of Matt Kessel’s point shot. It was his first goal since Nov. 18, 2025, just 10 days before he tore his ACL.
Fitting, then, that he ended with the game-winner too.
