The Islanders beat the Blackhawks and get closer and closer to the playoff cut line

Nobody throws parties for NHL .500, and Islanders coach Patrick Roy was in no mood for one after watching his team take their foot off the gas at the end of Thursday’s win.

Still, this day, which started with good news and ended with two points, marks the best place the Islanders have been in a long time.

You can see a healthy team on the horizon, with Mat Barzal, Anthony Duclair and Adam Pelech full participants in a morning skate for the first time since their injuries.

They can have the playoff cut-off in sight as they are now one point out of a place and behind the struggling Rangers only by games remaining, with both teams on 31 points.

The goal was to tread water until they were healthy, and after defeating the Blackhawks 5-4 at UBS Arena on Thursday, the Islanders are back in NHL contention with wins in three of their last four games. 500 – the definition of treading water – and a group of injured stars are about to return.

However, any good feelings were dashed by an angry head coach who watched his team stop playing hard and concede three straight goals in the final ten minutes, with Tyler Bertuzzi bringing the Blackhawks to 5-4 at two goals per minute , the second comes 10 seconds before the end of the game.

“If my team had done something like that to me back then, I would have broken a stick in this room,” Roy said. “I would be very upset if my team played like that in front of me. Ilya (Sorokin) is a gentleman, he is a first-class person, but this was unacceptable. We didn’t take part. We didn’t fight in front of the net in the last eight minutes. This is unacceptable.”

The Islanders entered the third period with a tenuous 2-1 lead, but stalled the game over a three-minute span in which Noah Dobson, Bo Horvat and Max Tsyplakov all scored, prompting Chicago to favor goaltender Arvid Soderblom by Drew Commesso.

Thanks in part to Roy juggling his lines in the second period, with Horvat switching between Anders Lee and Pierre Engvall and Tsyplakov returning to skating with Brock Nelson and Kyle Palmieri, the Islanders appeared to have settled down after a poor start and were in complete control to have taken over.

Dennis Cholowski and Simon Holmstrom erased a 1-0 deficit with back-to-back goals from long range in the second period, and it looked like a continuation in the third.

The competitive portion of the evening appeared to be almost over and the crowd – which had booed the Islanders off the ice after a lackluster first half – was enjoying the show.

Although the Blackhawks never looked like a real threat to win the game, with only ten seconds left to tie the game and some with no real action, what came next led to Roy publicly lashing out at his team .

“We can’t play like that,” Roy said. “It doesn’t matter where we are, what the score is – up, down, whatever. We have to protect our net and our goalkeeper better. We have one of the best in the game. He doesn’t deserve that. I hope we feel guilty about it. I really do. We have to play the game for 60 minutes and play a certain way.”

This season it has become commonplace to see the Islanders struggling on the ice without falling in the standings.

So maybe it only makes sense that the juxtaposition is extended to include Roy being just as angry as his group has been all year, after their long-term prospects suddenly look much brighter than they did 24 hours earlier.

However, it is undoubtedly true that the Islanders are more than a few players away from being a Cup contender.

However, the rankings certainly suggest right now that they are just a few players away from becoming a playoff team.

“It sucks how we played in front of Ilya at the end to let him down,” Dobson said. “He gives us a chance every night. So that’s up to us. We have to be much better in situations like this. But take the two points and move on.”

Anders Lee missed the morning skate after catching the virus that was circulating in the Islanders’ locker room, but played in Thursday’s game.

He only skated 15:34 minutes, with Roy citing illness as the reason for the reduction in ice time.

Isaiah George moved to the third defensive pair and swapped places with Dennis Cholowski, who played opposite Noah Dobson.