RALEIGH, N.C. — The Islanders only have one option, and that is to believe they can do the extremely unlikely.
So there was no need for them to explain why they were in such an upbeat mood for practice Thursday, or why they had such an optimistic point of view as they take a 3-0 deficit in this best-of-seven, second-round series against the Hurricanes into a must-win Game 4 Friday night.
They were holding onto the belief they could be the fifth team in the history of the NHL to overcome this monumental obstacle. And that’s because so few people believed they would be here in the first place, having secured 103 points during the regular season before their sweep of the Penguins in the first round.
“No one believed in us to have the regular season that we did,” captain Anders Lee told The Post after practice. “No one believed in us to beat the Pens, no one believes in us to come [back]. We’ll see what happens. Just keep doing what we’re doing in the sense of sticking together, playing for one another, and seeing what happens. That’s all we can do.”
There is a lot more the Islanders can do on the ice to give themselves a chance, at least to extend the series and send it back to Brooklyn for Game 5 on Sunday night. The offensive confidence frittered away during the 10-day break between series, and it was helped along by the Hurricanes playing a swarming defensive style. Each game has been relatively close — the 5-2 score in Game 3 abetted by two late empty-net goals — but all of the big plays have been made by Carolina.
“We understand and we talk about how close these games have been,” Lee said. “Not a bounce, but a play here or there, the series could be 2-1 or 1-2. It could be different than what it is. But at the same time, we’re down 3-0.”
Perhaps the biggest culprit in the Islanders’ current predicament has been losing the mental sharpness that defined their first-round performance. As the Hurricanes came off a double-overtime Game 7 to beat the Capitals, the Islanders moseyed into the series with no ability to maintain the mentality needed in the postseason.
“You can’t replicate playing and you can’t replicate mindset,” coach Barry Trotz said. “That’s why you see the teams in the National Hockey League, they all go through it — they go through slumps, [and] they go through times when you can’t lose a game no matter how hard you try. That’s sometimes the way it goes.”
Through the series’ first three games, the Islanders just couldn’t get going. They couldn’t force Carolina into turning the puck over as much as they did with the careless Penguins, so the transition game has been almost nonexistent. Working down low, they haven’t been able to create much space, and so many of the good chances they have gotten were bungled.
There is a big difference between poor execution and bad luck.
“Yeah, we’re in a huge hole. And we have to find a way to climb out of it,” Lee said. “But you can’t climb out of it in one game.”
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Yet the season could be over with one more lackluster performance. Trotz called Friday night “our Game 7,” but then there are three more waiting if they want to move on.
It’s a huge challenge, one that only four teams have completed — including the 1975 Islanders, and most recently the 2014 Kings. But the other 208 teams who faced the same deficit lost the series in some manner, giving the current Islanders a historical precedent of a 1.9 percent chance of pulling this off.
“It’s not an ideal situation for us, we know exactly where we’re at,” center Mat Barzal said. “This group is pretty resilient and we’re definitely not going to go away easy. We’re going to fight to that last buzzer. Anything can happen. Crazier things have happened, so who knows?”
And so the Islanders keep on believing, because there is nothing else.