There are mitigating circumstances — so, so many circumstances — but after a frustrating 1-0 loss at home to the Pittsburgh Penguins, the New York Islanders have now lost a tenth of their regular season schedule in the last 20 days.
For the Islanders, it was their eighth regulation loss in a row, which makes it so much worse since they haven’t salvaged regulation points from even one or two or three of these efforts, some of which were never good enough and some of which could’ve really used a nice bounce or two.