This was not a pretty win. It was not a particularly emphatic win.

It was not especially entertaining, nor was it even the best hockey the Islanders have played on a homestand where they lost four of their first five games.

All that said, the Islanders did what they had to do and issued a reminder on Tuesday night that, no, they have not forgotten how to win games.

They beat the Lightning 2-1 at UBS Arena to snap Tampa’s seven-game win streak and their own three-game losing streak, grinding out the sort of ugly victory that everyone in hockey loves to wax poetic on.

This was a low-event game where time came and went. At points, you could have mistaken it for mid-September given the sparse crowd inside UBS.

The Islanders did not play their best hockey, they were rarely up ice and the t

See Full Page