It is never good to lose games that circumstance begs you to win, and circumstance was begging the Islanders on Saturday night. 

Washington came into UBS Arena on the second night of a back-to-back with one of its best defensemen, Martin Fehervary, out injured and another, Rasmus Sandin, playing while banged up.

Hunter Shepard, who started for the Capitals in net, was making just his second start in the NHL and first in two weeks. 

There is no better circumstance to snap a three-game losing skid than that.

But the Islanders are a team whose problems right now always seem to outweigh those of their opposition.

They made it four losses in a row and five in six games, their record hitting .500 after a 4-1 defeat to the Capitals as the fans chanted for coach Lane Lambert to be fired throughout the third period. 

“I truly believe that we have a really good group of hockey players in here and a really good hockey team,” Bo Horvat said. “And it’s on us when we lose these games and [we’re] not scoring goals, not doing the right thing. We gotta take ownership on this road trip right here.” 

The chanting fans finally cleared out after Alex Ovechkin’s empty-netter with 3 seconds to go made the score 4-1. 

But what will make this one especially sting is that the Islanders did not get badly outplayed.

Unlike other losses during this run, the Islanders got pucks deep, cycled in the offensive zone and generally looked threatening, putting up 95 shot attempts, their most in a game since April 2015. 

This one, instead, came down to almost inexplicable moments of error. 

Like Sebastian Aho coming onto the ice slowly and allowing the Capitals to enter the zone with numbers.

Aho got on the backcheck and Semyon Varlamov made an acrobatic save on Nicolas Aube-Kubel, but could not stop Nic Dowd from getting on the rebound to put the Capitals ahead 2-1 at 13:05 of the second. 

“That can’t happen,” Lambert said. 

But it did. 

And so did Matthew Phillips, a 5-foot-7 rookie, beating Noah Dobson and Scott Mayfield to the puck behind the net before finding Aliaksei Protas strolling down the slot for a one-timer to make it 3-1 before the second intermission. 

And so did Ovechkin scoring the game’s first goal with a wrist shot from a faceoff 9:18 into the night, with the very same play the Capitals ran to get Ovechkin a shot on their first offensive zone draw of the night. 

“It’s a play they’ve used for years,” Lambert said. “He’s probably scored 60 goals that way. We lost the faceoff clean. … It’s one of those things where you just can’t lose a faceoff clean.” 

In between those moments, the Isles were playing fine hockey. 

But just two nights after Lambert bemoaned his team’s inability to play a 60-minute game, the Islanders played an unobjectionable 55 minutes and fundamentally collapsed in the other five. 

The only time the Islanders took advantage of the rookie goaltender came when Shepard was caught out at 19:17 of the first, letting Alexander Romanov tie the game at 1-1 with his first goal of the season, a shot into an empty net. 

Otherwise the Islanders didn’t seem to have an answer for Shepard, who stopped 36 shots, and couldn’t account for their own errors. 

“Gotta find a way to win a game,” Brock Nelson said. “Not exactly sure the one particular reason why it’s going the way it is. Collectively, as a group, gotta find a way to go out there and get the job done and do a little bit more to turn it [around].” 

A promising 5-2-2 start to the season has now been tossed away, and the Islanders are heading to Western Canada for a four-game trip with the baggage of a 5-5-3 mark and no momentum at all. 

“Certain parts of the year you’re gonna go through adversity,” Horvat said. “We’re going through it right now.” 

It is imperative for this team that things start to go right out west. It may be imperative for Lambert’s job status too.