THRASHERS 5, ISLANDERS 1: ‘Desperate’ team ends 3-game skid with rout

Uniondale, N.Y. —- John Anderson challenged his team in every way he could.

Play hard, the Thrashers’ coach said, or we’ll find somebody else who will. Play tough, or not only will you stay in last place, but nobody in the NHL will respect you. Play with desperation, because these are desperate times.

“We have to play ugly. We have to play hard. We have to play with some type of an edge to us,” Anderson said Saturday night, and that’s exactly what his team did.

The Thrashers fought and clawed and hustled their way to their most lopsided victory of the season, 5-1 over the New York Islanders.

The Thrashers ended a three-game losing streak and a five-game winless streak and won for just the second time in their past 10 games. They also hurdled Southeast Division rival Tampa Bay to escape last place in the NHL.

Ilya Kovalchuk led the way with a goal and two assists, and Johan Hedberg stopped the Islanders’ final 28 shots. But almost every Thrashers player left his mark on a game where all but two of the 18 skaters were on the ice for at least one goal.

There was fourth-line forward Eric Boulton, hustling up the ice and getting rewarded with his second goal in as many games when the puck bounced off a defenseman right onto his stick. There was Garnet Exelby, coming off arguably his poorest game of the season, responding with the pass to Bryan Little that created Atlanta’s first goal. There was rookie Joey Crabb, with an assist and a bleeding scalp, the latter courtesy of one of the game’s four fights or roughing incidents.

The Thrashers had been 1-7-1 since mid-November, and their season was falling apart, and they knew it. They needed this game, against an Islanders team that ranks last in the Atlantic Division.

“You can’t get much more desperate than this,” Anderson said. “Our only hope lies in our despair.”

“Obviously we were a little wounded and struggling,” Exelby said. “We didn’t want people to think they were going to walk over us.”

The 14,174 fans at Nassau Coliseum could have been excused for thinking just that after the Islanders scored with their first shot, a power play goal by Bill Guerin. But the defense tightened, and the Thrashers held an opponent to less than two goals for the first time since the season’s fourth game.

After Exelby fed Little for the game-tying goal, Kovalchuk went to work on the forecheck. He got the puck from Andy Sutton, flipped it behind to Marty Reasoner and kept skating forward. By the time Reasoner completed the give-and-go play, Kovalchuk was alone behind Sutton and easily beat Joey MacDonald for the second goal.

The Thrashers put only 17 shots on goal, but they scored on four in a row.

Eric Perrin scored on a power play feed from Jason Williams, and Chris Thorburn scored on a two-on-one with Kovalchuk.

The Thrashers (9-14-3) say Saturday is just a start. Avoiding last place isn’t their only ambition. They want more, and they’re a lot of points behind in the race to achieve it.

“Every game right now is going to be desperation for us,” Hedberg said. “We need to put a string of games together here, a string of wins.”

NEXT FOR THRASHERS

> Who: vs. Rangers

> When: 7 p.m. Wednesday

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