Flying high

Isles top Philly to win 4th straight

The Islanders and Flyers both were on the second end of a back-to-back Saturday evening, and it was easy to tell. But in the end, it was the Islanders who dug deep in the third period, pulling out a win on a flurry of goals early in the final 20 minutes.

The 5-2 victory was the fourth straight for the Isles, who are 15-8-0, sitting pretty in second place in the Metropolitan Division. They have another game against the same team Tuesday, this one in Philadelphia, with a chance to extend the win streak to five.

On this Saturday a year ago, general manager Lou Lamoriello was giving a downtrodden press conference about his team getting shut down for COVID-19. This year’s Islanders, though, are right where many thought they’d be a year ago: dispatching teams like the Flyers, playing workmanlike hockey and banking points for the playoff race.

“I think we have a good mindset in here of when things maybe aren’t going as well, just regrouping and finding a way and bearing down and getting back to our game,” Ryan Pulock told The Post. “We did that again tonight.”

Brock Nelson put the Isles ahead for good just under three minutes into the third period, sniping the puck past Felix Sandstrom off a Pulock feed to break a 2-2 tie.

Before Nelson’s goal was announced in UBS Arena, Anthony Beauvillier had scored again, all of 22 seconds later, to make it 4-2, with another primary assist from Pulock.

The Flyers, who had played the Islanders tight through the opening 40 minutes, were promptly stonewalled by Semyon Varlamov, who finished with 25 stops, in their attempts to get back into the game. Parise provided the finishing blow, a well-placed wrist shot finding its way under the bar for a power-play goal at 11:57 and giving Pulock a fourth assist on the night.

“In the second period, I didn’t think that we were going north and pushing,” Isles coach Lane Lambert said. “Part of it was because of them. I thought we got back to our game a little bit more [in the third] and started forechecking, created some turnovers.”

From there, the drama came in the form of a brawl with just over three minutes to go, sparked by Nicolas Deslauriers jumping Alexander Romanov following a Romanov hit. That resulted in Deslauriers and Scott Mayfield given game misconducts, and in Oliver

Wahlstrom getting a hearty tribute from UBS Arena for winning a fight against Tony DeAngelo handily.

Lambert and players alike did not take issue with Deslauriers when asked, but Wahlstrom’s teammates gave him plaudits on his second fight in the past week.

The Islanders, who have struggled with slow starts this season, had no such issue Saturday. They ran roughshod over the Flyers for the game’s first five minutes, with Adam Pelech scoring on a one-timer from between the left hashes at 4:33 to punctuate the onslaught. The momentum wouldn’t last the duration of the period, though, and the Flyers got one back on Lukas Sedlak’s goal at 15:27.

The Flyers took the lead at 9:28 of the second after Joel Farabee banged in a rebound from Kevin Hayes, but the Islanders would tie it before the second intermission, with Zach Parise scoring on a backhand at the tail end of a power play he earned by taking a crosscheck from Ivan Provorov, sending him tumbling into the Philadelphia net.

Doubtless, Parise will take that trade every time. Especially when it comes with two points.

“We maybe got a little too fancy partway through [the second] period and got away from what was working,” Pulock said. “And just getting pucks in with forechecking, that’s kind of our bread and butter. And when we’re doing that, we’re a tough team to handle. Obviously we did a good job of finding that again in the third.”

They did enough of it to come away with two more points in their pocket — and that is what matters.