Skidding Islanders can’t climb out of early hole in loss to Bruins

Dueling chants broke out at UBS Arena in the waning moments of a 6-3 Islanders loss to the Bruins on Wednesday night.

From the Islanders fans who did not head for the exits after Nikita Zadorov’s empty-net goal: “Fire Lou!”

From the Boston fans who made the trip down to Long Island: “Let’s go Bruins!”

Rock bottom for the season so far, and the Islanders had better hope it goes up from here.

“Every night, they’re there, they’re pushing,” coach Patrick Roy said, insisting on maintaining optimism about his team despite its halting 8-10-5 record with just four regulation wins so far. “It’s the team that [general manager] Lou [Lamoriello] gave me and I’m gonna work extremely hard for these guys and I owe this to the players and to our fans, to make sure that we compete every night.

“Our fans might be pissed off because we’re losing games, but one thing, we compete every night and I would love to see the result be on our side instead of the losing side.”

The Islanders did show some resilience in this one, coming back from deficits of 2-0 and 3-2, and they did have the better chances according to the analytics.

But a slow start and a poor finish meant that, yet again, the Islanders were trying to win the game while failing to put up a 60-minute effort.

By now, everybody knows how that goes.

The Islanders did not come ready to play in this one, falling down 2-0 and forcing Roy to call timeout within the game’s first 6:31. That jolted them into shape somewhat, but the damage was already done.

Brock Nelson gave them the initiative heading into the final 20 minutes by lashing a puck past Joonas Korpisalo with just eight seconds left in the second, tying the game at three, but they failed to make good on the momentum.

Though they built some pressure at the start of the third period, they failed to turn it into a goal.

The Bruins then took advantage, as Pavel Zacha deflected Andrew Peeke’s point shot in at the 10:48 mark of the period to make it 4-3.

Mere minutes later, with the Islanders’ resolve evidently depleted, David Pastrnak fed Zacha in front to make it 5-3 — prompting a round of “Fire Lou,” chants from the crowd, which ranked as one of the most raucous of the year at UBS Arena, and directed ire at Lamoriello throughout the night.

Zadorov put in an empty-netter with just over two minutes to go after coming out of the penalty box with the Islanders having gone scoreless on their only power play of the night.

“It just seems like we make a little mistake here, wherever it might be on the ice, and it just compounds and ends up in the back of our net,” Ryan Pulock said. “We need to find a way to dig deep in those situations. Tie game midway through the third, whatever it is, you just gotta be smart with the puck. You can’t mess around. Right now, every time we make a mistake, it’s costing us.”

Excellent as Ilya Sorokin has been this season, he was not at all on his game Wednesday, with six high-danger chances leading to Boston’s first five goals, per Natural Stat Trick.

You can call it another game lost in the third period. But it is just as accurate, if not more so, to call it a game the Islanders lost in the opening minutes, when they fell in a 2-0 hole before pulling back to 2-2 on goals from Maxim Tsyplakov and Nelson.

The late start, however, did the Islanders no more favors than their failures to finish the game.

Roy, defiantly optimistic, said it is simply his nature to focus relentlessly on the good things.

“It’s a long season,” he said. “How many times we said last season, ‘Oh, the Islanders are not gonna make the playoffs, oh the Islanders lost that big game, they lost that big game, that big game?’ We know we gotta stay close to that .500 mark when all the [injured] guys gonna be back and that’s what we’re trying to do. But we piss away some games that we could win.

“It is what it is.”

They might still be in the playoff hunt. They might still be dealing with injuries. But right now, what the Islanders are is a team with just eight wins to their name at Thanksgiving.

It is what it is.