MONTREAL — Maybe the first game back after three weeks was always going to be about which team could shake the cobwebs off quicker, and certainly neither the Islanders nor Canadiens were anything like the best versions of themselves on Thursday night.
You would have been forgiven for assuming all 40 players on the ice had just gotten back from Milan, as the hockey took on a jet-lagged and disjointed quality.
The Islanders, though, are in a situation with no runway, entering Thursday with a four-point lead on a playoff spot before a road-heavy schedule stretch. And as the game wore on, they found the necessary urgency, tying the game late in regulation and eking out a 4-3 win on Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s overtime winner.
This was not pretty hockey. Both teams looked disjointed at points. The Islanders missed plenty of passes, lost plenty of battles. So too did the Canadiens.
Nevertheless, this turned into a fun one by the end, largely because of the two defensemen who are so central to the story of this Islanders’ season. Going into the third period, Noah Dobson had two goals against his old club, Matthew Schaefer had two goals for his new club and it was anyone’s game.
The Canadiens, though, struck first in the third, with Cole Caufield making the Islanders pay after Kyle MacLean went for tripping. Caufield put in Ivan Demidov’s cross-crease feed after Juraj Slafkovsky had broken his stick on an attempted one-timer and the puck fell to Demidov for a 3-2 lead at 9:11 of the third.
The Islanders spent the rest of the third pressing, but it took until there was 1:41 to go and they were skating at six-on-five for Anders Lee to finally tip Bo Horvat’s shot in and tie the game at three, sending his 900th career game into overtime.
The Islanders barely touched the puck for the first 1:23 of overtime, but Pageau got a breakaway and pushed his backhand past Montembeault for the win.
Dobson’s pair of goals had come before Schaefer’s, with No. 53 getting on the board with a left-circle blast 12:11 into the game after the Islanders were caught off a poor change. He got a second on the power play, with his slap shot from the top of the zone making its way through traffic at 10:16 of the second.
Earlier in the day, Dobson had fielded the obligatory swell of media before his first game after being dealt from the Islanders to the Canadiens, only for Schaefer to field an even bigger group of Montreal media for his first game in the capital of hockey.
It was only right that these two would play a central role here and Schaefer got two in the span of 55 seconds late in the second period.
With the Islanders skating five-on-three, he scored from the top of the slot to cut the lead in half. Then when the power play ended, he went and scored one of his more ridiculous goals of the season, skating behind the net, going around it, pulling up before the blue line, cutting back and lashing a shot from atop the right circle. By the end of the sequence, according to MSG, Schaefer had skated over 270 feet.
The first goal gave Schaefer the franchise lead in goals for a rookie defenseman. The second goal gave him the all-time lead in goals by an 18-year-old defenseman.
And another night where you wondered where the Islanders might be without him.
