Conclusion: The Islanders lose 6-3 to the Bruins

The New York Islanders lost 6-3 to the Boston Bruins on Wednesday night and finished their three games at home with a record of 1-2-0.

Brock Nelson (2G, 1A) and Max Tsyplakov scored for the Islanders, but Boston exploded with six goals from Brad Marchand (2G), Morgan Geekie, Pavel Zacha (2G) and Nikita Zadorov, including three in the third period. Ilya Sorokin saved 15 of 20 shots in the loss, while Joonas Korpisalo saved 21 in the win.

The result hurts for the Isles, who overcame 2-0 and 3-2 deficits to tie the score but couldn’t get the job done in an important game against an Eastern Conference opponent that’s neck-and-neck in the standings could.

“We fought back all night tonight, kept tying the game and just couldn’t tie it in the third period,” said captain Anders Lee. “We have to get better, there’s no doubt about that. We don’t win hockey games.”

The Bruins got off to a hot start after Elias Lindholm won the tie in the Isles zone and channeled the puck to Marchand, who fired a shot from the high slot to open the score at 51 seconds.

Justin Brazeau extended the Bruins’ lead when he edged out Scott Mayfield and Dennis Cholowski to gain control of the puck in the slot and find Marchand, who scored his second goal of the game at 6:31 of the first frame. Down 2-0 after conceding two quick goals from the Bruins superstar, head coach Patrick Roy called a timeout to calm his team down.

“We didn’t get off to a good start, we took a timeout because I just wanted to make sure we didn’t put ourselves in too big of a hole,” Roy said. “We wanted to give ourselves a chance to stay in this game.”

The time out was effective and gave the Isles some life. Nelson deflected the puck off the center wall and passed it to Tsyplakov, who flicked it with a backhand that five-punched Korpisalo and put the Islanders on the board at 12:50 of the first. The Russian winger almost scored a second goal a few minutes later when he made a clever move into the penalty area, but Korpisalo parried.