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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.
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.
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 Kyle Palmieri tripped Liam Ohrgren late in the second.
Not only did Brock Boeser tied 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.
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 five-on-five — the second of which came after Matias Maccelli swapped places with Emil Heineman amid a superb evening from No. 63 — is just what the Islanders needed.
For the rest of the third, 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, Emil Heineman drew a penalty on Zeev Buium that kept the Islanders in the driver’s seat when they should have been frantically defending at five-on-six.
Maccelli had driven play early in the night as part of a fourth line that 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.
That was just 53 seconds after the Islanders had scored first on Kyle Palmieri’s tip-in of Matt Kessel’s point shot. Kessel was suiting up for the first time this season, having been inserted into the lineup for Scott Mayfield and playing on the left of the third pair, allowing Tony DeAngelo to move back to his natural right side.
Palmieri’s goal was his first since Nov. 18, 2025, just 10 days before he tore his ACL.
Fitting, then, that he ended with the game-winner too.