Islanders give alarming worst season effort in worrisome blowout to Kraken

Maybe this will jolt some urgency into the Islanders.

For a club that’s won just three games out of its last 13, there hasn’t been all too much of that lately, and the veneer of close losses finally broke down on Thursday night in a listless and shambolic 5-2 defeat to the Kraken at UBS Arena.

The Islanders are now 9-11-7 with just 25 points through 27 games, and whatever the excuses — injuries; so many one-goal games going the wrong way; they are still within a couple points of a playoff spot — they are in the Metropolitan Division’s basement.

While their neighbors across the East River have been in Save The Season mode, despite a record that has mostly covered up the team’s underlying issues, the Islanders have yet to approach anything even in the ballpark of that rhetoric.

After Thursday, that might change.

This was, hands down, the worst performance of the season, as the Islanders were outworked and outplayed over all 200 feet.

They lacked any detail or emotion to their game, got pushed around and were dominated on special teams.

For good measure, Ilya Sorokin struggled in nets, letting in four goals in the first 13 shots he saw before getting pulled in the third for Marcus Hogberg.

The only Islanders performance of recent vintage that compares is the 5-0 loss in Minnesota last season, which essentially sealed Lane Lambert’s fate.

There was no third-period lead to blow in this one, and the attempt to jolt Pierre Engvall into shape by putting him onto the second line went nowhere as the Swede failed to establish a physical presence around the net as Patrick Roy has been begging him to do for weeks.

Then again, so too did the Islanders, who gave up a pair of tip-in goals in the game’s first 20 minutes.

An unmanned Tye Kartye gave Seattle the lead just 2:46 into the match when he tipped in Vince Dunn’s shot from the left point.

Dunn picked up another assist later in the first when Oliver Bjkorkstrand deflected in his shot at the end of a Seattle power play.

Engvall, though, sealed his demotion back to the fourth line (and quite possibly to being a healthy scratch) with an effortless job at winning the puck from Yanni Gourde early in the second period, leading to Vince Dunn skating unimpeded around the zone and scoring to make it 3-0.

That was the first of two bad goals Sorokin would allow, the second coming on a Shane Wright shot from the left circle that beat the goalie clean on the near side, giving the Kraken their second power-play goal of the game at 13:05 of the second.

Given their own trio of power-play chances — one being a four-minute double-minor — the Islanders could not cobble together anything of note and often struggled to hold possession of the puck.

Those special teams trends are nothing new.

By the time Noah Dobson scored with 8:03 left in the game to break Joey Daccord’s shutout, most of the fans at the arena were long gone.

The Islanders put some dignity back on the score line with Max Tsyplakov’s six-on-five goal to make it 4-2, but that proved to be only symbolic.

Any inkling of a miracle comeback was put to bed with Jaden Schwartz’s empty-net goal.

It’s a broken record at this point to say the Islanders are hoping their fortunes will better when they reach full health, but even days with good injury news — Adam Pelech rejoining the team at morning skate — come with caveats. Semyon Varlamov is day to day with a lower-body injury, which is why Hogberg relieved Sorokin on Thursday. Kyle Palmieri and Grant Hutton both left the game with injury at different points, though both returned.

It served as a reminder: Full health, in the NHL, is usually a thing that only exists in the imagination.

Over here in reality, the Islanders are going to need to figure this out with what they’ve got.

Over here in reality, they have won three of their past 13 games, and that is not cutting it.