being held out of the match for roster management reasons<\/a> 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.<\/p>\nEmil Heineman (left), who scored later in the game, celebrates a goal by Ondrej Palat during the first period of the Islanders\u2019 5-2 win over the Rangers on Jan. 28, 2026 at UBS Arena. Robert Sabo for New York Post<\/p>\n
There was the UBS scoreboard, showing the Rangers had only one shot on goal in nearly 15 minutes.<\/p>\n
At least this time, they didn\u2019t get shut out.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The injection of energy brought by the acquisitions of Palat and Carson Soucy \u2014 the latter of whom made his Islanders debut against the team he played for until Monday night \u2014 was evident all night long.<\/p>\n
The Islanders played with the puck. <\/p>\n
They got below the hash marks and worked off the cycle, controlling proceedings all night long. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s feed that made it 5-2 late in the third.<\/p>\n
The third line of Anders Lee, Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Simon Holmstrom was the Islanders\u2019 best, though, with Holmstrom playing a starring role. <\/p>\n
Simon Holmstrom scored a goal on Spencer Martin during the first period of the Islanders\u2019 win over the Rangers. Robert Sabo for New York Post<\/p>\n
He fed Palat\u2019s opening goal on the power play, scored just 1:11 later off Tony DeAngelo\u2019s 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\u2019s one-timer beat Spencer Martin across the crease.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Mika Zibanejad\u2019s power-play one-timer briefly brought the Rangers within 2-1 at 13:12 of the second, but Barzal\u2019s goal, followed 42 seconds later by Pageau jamming Marc Gatcomb\u2019s rebound into the crease, quickly extended the Islanders\u2019 lead back to 4-1.<\/p>\n
Matt Rempe gets into a fight with Adam Pelech during the second period of the Rangers\u2019 blowout loss to the Islanders. Robert Sabo for New York Post<\/p>\n
David Rittich, who had quietly struggled for much of January, had a solid night in nets for the Islanders as well, though the Rangers\u2019 scoring chances came few and far between.<\/p>\n
For the second game in a row, this was more about the Islanders\u2019 play in front of the goalie than it was about the goalie \u2014 an extremely positive sign.<\/p>\n
And for the third time in three games against the Rangers, this looked like a playoff team facing a last-place club.<\/p>\n
Oh wait. That\u2019s exactly what it was. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you wanted to sum up the state of the Battle of New York in one moment, you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":436256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[128627,75619,11558,394,4823,385,75620,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-436255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-jean-gabriel-pageau","9":"tag-mathew-barzal","10":"tag-mika-zibanejad","11":"tag-new-york-islanders","12":"tag-new-york-rangers","13":"tag-nhl","14":"tag-simon-holmstrom","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/436256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}