Schwartz: Ryan Pulock finally trending in the right direction

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For a plethora of reasons, one could certainly say the story of the Islanders’ season should be titled “The Imperfect Storm.”

Whether you want to use all of the reasons as excuses or simply facts, whatever could go wrong for the Islanders, especially early in the season, did – and that’s why, after back-to-back runs to the NHL’s final four, the Islanders are just about playing out the string right now.

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One of the things that went wrong for the Islanders early in the season was a lower-body injury to defenseman Ryan Pulock, who signed an eight-year contract extension during the off-season before getting hurt on Nov. 15, in the 12th game of the Isles’ season-opening 13-game road trip. The original prognosis was that the 27-year-old would be out four-to-six weeks, but that timetable was extended to the point where he missed 25 games before returning on February 1 against Ottawa.

Finally, 34 games later, Pulock is looking more like what he was before the injury.

“I think he’s back to close to where you expect him to be,” said Head Coach Barry Trotz following Monday’s practice.

Barring a miracle, Pulock and the islanders will not be going to the post-season for the fourth straight year, but they have been playing better recently, and the objective is to try and build momentum towards the off-season and to get things back on track for next season.

And for Pulock, it’s an opportunity to keep getting better.

“It’s our job to show up every single night, continue to get better and continue to help your team win hockey games,” said Pulock. “For myself personally, that’s my goal here to finish out the season, to finish out the right way and to finish out strong and help this team win and just keep building that way.”

Over 46 games this season, Pulock has three goals and 13 assists, and a plus-2 rating. Adrenaline got him through that first game back from injury, but from there, Pulock needed some time to get back to his usual form and get up to game speed.

And, after getting a few games under his belt once he returned, Ryan Pulock started to look like Ryan Pulock again.

“He looked (when he first returned) not heavy but just didn’t have that pop that you need to have,” said Trotz. “It takes some time to get up to game speed. I thought he probably had about five games before he started trending the other way.”

And that’s when Pulock began to look like himself, and was able to handle more minutes and make decisions a lot quicker.

The Islanders have made a bit of a push up the Eastern Conference standings, but with just 11 games to go, the ninth-place Islanders are 15 points behind the Washington Capitals for the final playoff position.  There doesn’t appear to be enough runway left for the Isles to climb the mountain, but their recent play is reason for everyone in Islanders Country to be optimistic about the future, because this is not a team that needs to be broken apart.

“If you look back to the past couple of months, I think we’ve been more ourselves,” said Pulock. “That’s how we’ve had success in the past, is just doing what we do best: playing our structure, playing our game and just working. We just have to continue that and keep building on that, and it will help us moving forward throughout this year and into next year.”

For Ryan Pulock and the Islanders, this season hasn’t gone as planned, but the silver lining is that things are trending in the right direction – and with a bit of tweaking this coming summer, we just may be getting back to talking about the Islanders getting ready for the playoffs instead of a summer of “what if’s.”

Follow Peter Schwartz on Twitter: @SchwartzSports

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