BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Play­ing in a half-empty build­ing, against a team that had just one win in its last 10 con­tests, the Pen­guins’ game against the New York Islanders Tues­day night at Ba­rclays Center cer­tainly didn’t have a play­off feel to it.

And the Pen­guins de­liv­ered a far-less-than-play­off-cal­i­ber per­for­mance.

Their 4-1 loss to the Islanders means two points lost in an air-tight Met­ro­pol­i­tan Divi­sion play­off race as the fi­nal 10 games of the sea­son get un­der­way.

Mike Sul­li­van didn't care to elab­o­rate much af­ter the game, but did of­fer a pretty suc­cinct anal­y­sis for what he thought went wrong for his team Tues­day night.

Sam Werner

Matt Murray returns to Penguins' lineup

“We didn’t de­fend hard enough, we lacked dis­ci­pline and we didn’t have a good start,” Sul­li­van said. “That was the story of the game.”

He’s not wrong.

Let's start with his third rea­son and work back­ward. The Pen­guins’ start Tues­day night was rem­i­nis­cent of their first few min­utes of their last game, Thurs­day in Mon­treal. Just in like that game, they were be­hind 2-0 in the first pe­riod. Against the Ca­n­a­diens, they came back to level the score be­fore the first in­ter­mis­sion.

But af­ter Matt Barzal and Adam Pelech put the Islanders up 2-0 in the first pe­riod Tues­day, they were able to hold that lead when the teams went into the dress­ing room.

The Pen­guins didn’t get on the board un­til Conor Sheary con­verted on a Phil Kes­sel feed late in the sec­ond pe­riod.

“I don’t think we got many bounces, but I don’t think that was the re­sult of the game,” Sheary said. “I think we just weren’t ready to play. We let them get out to that two-goal lead and we took too many pen­al­ties.”

And there’s Sul­li­van’s sec­ond point — the pen­al­ties. The Pen­guins gave the Islanders five power-play op­por­tu­ni­ties. The pen­alty kill was able to come up with stops on the first four, but Anders Lee scored on the Islanders’ fifth and fi­nal man-ad­van­tage chance early in the third to make the score 3-1.

Jason Mackey

20 Penguins Thoughts: Relationship between Sidney Crosby and Mike Sullivan is special

It wasn’t that the Islanders were nec­es­sar­ily cash­ing in on power-play goal af­ter power-play goal, but the con­stant stream of Pen­guins to the pen­alty box — six dif­fer­ent play­ers served mi­nors — pre­vented them from es­tab­lish­ing any kind of of­fen­sive flow and get­ting back into the game.

“It makes a big dif­fer­ence,” Sul­li­van said. “Every time we tried to get into a flow, we took an­other pen­alty, and it’s hard to win that way. We didn’t have nearly the dis­ci­pline we needed to have to be the team we want to be to­night. We beat our­selves.”

And fi­nally, the Pen­guins al­lowed the Islanders to keep get­ting chances even af­ter that slow start, as they were try­ing to mount a come­back. Matt Mur­ray, play­ing in his first game back af­ter miss­ing nine with a con­cus­sion, faced 39 shots. His strong play, de­spite hav­ing missed nearly a month of ac­tion, was a ma­jor rea­son the Pen­guins were down only two goals in the third pe­riod.

“He made a lot of saves,” Sul­li­van said. “He made a lot of high-qual­ity saves be­cause the qual­ity of the chances we gave up were too high.”

Yes, the Pen­guins had their fair share of chances against Chris­to­pher Gib­son, who stopped 36 shots for the Islanders, and prob­a­bly could’ve had a few more goals. But they know, as the cal­en­dar turns to April, they can’t rely on of­fen­sive fire­power alone to win games.

“Ob­vi­ously we had chances, but I don’t think we’re happy with the game we played,” Ri­ley Sheahan said. “We were turn­ing the puck over at the wrong spots, just mak­ing some lack­a­dai­si­cal er­rors. That’s what hap­pens when you don’t play a con­sis­tent game.”

When asked if he felt his team has been in­con­sis­tent over the last few weeks, Sul­li­van de­liv­ered a terse “Yes.” His re­sponse to a fol­low-up ques­tion, on whether or not that’s par­tic­u­larly trou­bling at this late stage of the sea­son?

“Yes.”

The Pen­guins are still al­most cer­tain to make the play­offs, but they don’t ex­actly have a ton of breath­ing room in the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Divi­sion. At the end of games Tues­day night, they were tied with Co­lum­bus for sec­ond place, just a point ahead of the Fly­ers in the first wild-card spot.

They prob­a­bly don’t have to worry about the Devils (five points back) or the Pan­thers (six points back) quite yet, but win­ning games is the only way to en­sure that doesn’t be­come an is­sue.

“This was not our best game, but what can you do about it now?” Pat­ric Horn­qvist said. “The only thing we can do is have a bet­ter game to­mor­row. Make sure we come out with a bet­ter ef­fort and our mind­set has to be bet­ter. I know it will be.”

Sam Werner: swerner@post-ga­zette.com and Twit­ter @SWern­erPG.

First Published: March 21, 2018, 1:49 a.m.