If you wanted to sum up the state of the Battle of New York in one moment, you could do a lot worse than 14:59 of the first period Wednesday night.
There was Ondrej Palat, celebrating his first goal as an Islander one day after being traded across town from New Jersey.
There wasn’t Artemi Panarin, the highest-paid Rangers player, being held out of the match for roster management reasons as the Blueshirts seek to take the next step of their teardown by moving the Russian wing who chose Broadway over Long Island in 2019.
There was the UBS scoreboard, showing the Rangers had only one shot on goal in nearly 15 minutes.
At least this time, they didn’t get shut out.
The Islanders, though, took their third game of three against their rivals this season, tilting the ice all night long in cruising to a 5-2 win over the Rangers.
The injection of energy brought by the acquisitions of Palat and Carson Soucy — the latter of whom made his Islanders debut against the team he played for until Monday night — was evident all night long.
The Islanders played with the puck.
They got below the hash marks and worked off the cycle, controlling proceedings all night long.
Palat seemed to instantly click with Bo Horvat and Emil Heineman, the latter of whom had his most noticeable game in weeks, accounting for a number of dangerous looks before finally breaking through off Adam Pelech’s feed that made it 5-2 late in the third.
The third line of Anders Lee, Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Simon Holmstrom was the Islanders’ best, though, with Holmstrom playing a starring role.
He fed Palat’s opening goal on the power play, scored just 1:11 later off Tony DeAngelo’s slick backdoor feed, then added a second power-play assist on a beautiful tic-tac-toe passing sequence on which the puck pinged from DeAngelo to Horvat to Holmstrom to Barzal before No. 13’s one-timer beat Spencer Martin across the crease.
DeAngelo, whose play has gone up a notch lately, was nothing short of terrific against his old club, his vision and passing at an elite level all night long.
Mika Zibanejad’s power-play one-timer briefly brought the Rangers within 2-1 at 13:12 of the second, but Barzal’s goal, followed 42 seconds later by Pageau jamming Marc Gatcomb’s rebound into the crease, quickly extended the Islanders’ lead back to 4-1.
David Rittich, who had quietly struggled for much of January, had a solid night in nets for the Islanders as well, though the Rangers’ scoring chances came few and far between.
For the second game in a row, this was more about the Islanders’ play in front of the goalie than it was about the goalie — an extremely positive sign.
And for the third time in three games against the Rangers, this looked like a playoff team facing a last-place club.
Oh wait. That’s exactly what it was.
