About a month and 12 games ago, after the afternoon no-show against the Tampa Bay Lightning in The Biggest Game of the Season Thus Far—a title usurped by basically every game since—I wrote this Bits piece in which I called the season. The fact that the New York Islanders knew the stakes of that game and then looked like they didn’t give a shit until the last 10 minutes of the game showed me that they didn’t belong, and the points deficit seemed insurmountable.
Then the Islanders ripped off six straight wins while the teams in the chase stumbled, and the door swung wide open.