EDMONTON, Alberta — Just when you thought the Islanders had found the better side of their game, they go and do this.

The best thing you could say about Thursday night in Edmonton is that the 4-2 loss to the Oilers did not end up being quite as bad as it looked after the first 20 minutes. Aside from Ilya Sorokin’s 34 saves in nets, though, the Islanders struggled in every area.

The Islanders couldn’t transition up the ice. They couldn’t run a clean power play. They weren’t quick enough, getting beaten to nearly every puck and muscled off when they did match Edmonton’s speed. They struggled to do the basics — passing and handling — in this mess of a loss. Across 60 minutes, the final tally on high-danger chances read 21-0, per Natural Stat Trick.

“It’s just a matter of every single guy individually just having themselves ready to go and play the right way and the way that we play,” Ryan Pulock said. “Cause when we don’t do that, we don’t have a lot of success.”

After one period, the Oilers had two goals and the Islanders had four shots. The Islanders eventually made the score more competitive, but make no mistake, they were thoroughly outplayed on the night.

“We can’t expect to start off slow and spot the other team two, three, whatever goals a night to start,” Noah Dobson said. “When you’re playing from behind it makes it even tougher against good teams.”

Asked to make sense of the team’s trend of poor first periods — and all three first periods have been poor on this road trip — coach Lane Lambert gave a verbal shrug.

“We’re searching for answers on that,” Lambert said. “We have to find answers.

“We knew they were going to come out hard, that’s fine. We failed to make little plays. You have to make little plays to get pucks out of your zone when teams are coming at you hard and we didn’t.”

Mathew Barzal’s snipe from the right faceoff dot at 4:42 of the second helped the Islanders find their footing as it cut a two-goal Edmonton lead in half to make it 2-1. But it was shortly followed by goals from Dylan Holloway and Zach Hyman to make it 4-1, Oilers, the latter coming off a brutal defensive breakdown that let Hyman skate in on Sorokin unimpeded.

Cal Clutterbuck, who was playing his first game back after a finger injury, got on the scoresheet with 53 seconds to go in the second to keep the game within arm’s length going into the third.

That allowed the Islanders to keep some dignity in the final score, and take something positive away from the evening. The final 20 minutes came and went without the Islanders seriously challenging for the victory, but at least it was better than the woeful first 20.

Leon Draisaitl put the Oilers up 1-0 at 9:26 of the first with a one-timer from the left circle off Connor McDavid’s feed, crashing the door down after the Oilers knocked on it for the entire power play. When the Islanders got a chance of their own on Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’ hooking penalty at 17:19, they responded by getting one shot on goal and giving up a shorthanded tally, as Kailer Yamamoto got up the ice unimpeded to double the lead to two.

“I just don’t think we were ready,” Pulock said. “We didn’t do enough. We were on our heels and they came at us and we weren’t able to get going north.”

A win in Calgary on Friday can wipe this one from their memories quickly, but even on the heels of four wins in five, it’s hard to spin a loss like this positively. The defeat knocks the Islanders down to 22-16-2 and sets up Friday’s match at Calgary as a chance to salvage a .500 record on the four-game trip out west. The Islanders also lose two points on the Rangers and Capitals, who both were victorious on Thursday.

More important than the big-picture impact on the standings, though, is that the Islanders failed to compete for 60 minutes with a team that, like them, is fighting for a wild-card playoff spot. In November at UBS Arena, the Islanders rode Sorokin to a blowout win over the Oilers.

Out here on the prairie, it wasn’t just McDavid and Draisaitl overwhelming them — it was a loss from top to bottom.