Islanders grind out win over Stars to improve playoffs chances

The Islanders seemed to run the gamut on Thursday, playing one of those games that showed all the reasons they could be a dangerous playoff team and all the reasons they might not make the tournament at all, all at once.

At the end of it, they had a 2-1 win over the Stars at UBS Arena that did indeed inch them closer to the postseason and counted as a bounce-back performance off Tuesday’s loss to Chicago.

Call that their better angels winning out.

To get there required a low-event match in which the breakout-challenged Islanders were pushed repeatedly.

Ilya Sorokin, who will be leaned on heavily over the next few weeks, was called on to defend a series of grade-A chances.

The power play was, again, frustrating. The Islanders, for the third straight game, took the lead inside of five minutes and then absorbed pressure for far too long.

Still, against the highly powered Stars and down Tony DeAngelo, the Islanders did a good job of keeping their opposition to the outside.

They generated enough off the rush to feel, going into the third period, that the score could have been much better than 1-0. Sorokin was terrific.

The Islanders dug in and found a way, the way they seem to do so well.

Bo Horvat’s 30th goal of the season, his second time in three seasons hitting that mark with the Islanders, was the difference heading into the third, with Sorokin’s heroics having kept the Stars from tying it on the power play midway through the second.

The Islanders, though, were not going to win this game by sitting on a 1-0 lead for 55 minutes, and of course it was the kids who have defined this season who made sure they would not.

Matthew Schaefer made a brilliant heads-up play 2:19 into the third, throwing the puck into traffic in front of the net, where it banked off Cal Ritchie’s skate and past Jake Oettinger to make it 2-0.