Waving the white flag would have been the easy thing for the Islanders to do.
The Islanders had lost two of three games in California immediately after the Brock Nelson trade and looked adrift without one of their best players. They were five points out of the playoffs with a thicket of teams to pass and just over a month left in the season.
They had rallied to make it a year earlier, but this was a different, tougher task.
“Him leaving wasn’t gonna be like, ‘Oh we’re packing it in.’ If anything it’s gonna fuel us to wanna make the playoffs even more,” Bo Horvat told The Post before Monday’s game against the Blue Jackets. “Knowing that we can lose one of our best players — and obviously we’d love to have him here — when you lose one of your best players, to dig down deep and find a way to make the playoffs without him, I think that says a lot about this group. That’s what we’re trying to do.”