No Special Treatment
Roy sends message; Isles visit Philly in Metro tilt
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Good Morning, Islanders Country.
Patrick Roy didn’t wait for desperation to knock before he made a statement.
Saturday afternoon at UBS Arena, with the Islanders trailing the Buffalo Sabres 2–0 after two periods, Roy decided the scoreboard wasn’t the biggest problem. So he did something that landed with a thud louder than any goal horn: he benched his entire second line — Anders Lee, Mathew Barzal, and Anthony Duclair — for the whole third period.
Not a warning shift. Not a shortened leash. Gone.
It came after a sequence that made every coach in hockey wince. With 11.4 seconds left in the second period, a turnover in the Sabres’ zone turned into a track meet the wrong way. Barzal and Duclair coasted back. Lee was left alone trying to plug the leak. Tage Thompson drifted into the slot untouched, took a slick pass from behind the net, and snapped it past David Rittich.
Roy had seen enough.
The Islanders rolled three lines the rest of the way in what became a 5–0 loss. But the margin didn’t matter. The message did.
“Back-checking doesn’t require talent; it requires will,” Roy said afterward. “And this is what this team is about.”
That line said everything.
