Andy Greene looked straight down. Sitting on the bench, he wore a look of total dejection and defeat.

There were 1.5 seconds left in the game, Mason Appleton just having scored an empty-net goal, and the look on Greene’s face echoed across the Islanders’ bench.

“We viewed this game as a must-win,” Brock Nelson would say afterwards. “We needed these points.”

Against the struggling Seattle Kraken, that’s just what Wednesday night was. But the Islanders didn’t play like it, losing 3-0 in an effort coach Barry Trotz called “one of the more disappointing games that I’ve coached as an Islander coach.”

“Too many turnovers, got outcompeted,” Trotz said of a third period in which his team fell apart, giving up three goals, his players playing like they were looking ahead to their All-Star break vacations. “Their will was a lot stronger than our will. That’s where it ended up. They wanted it more.

“Words don’t mean anything. It’s actions.”

At this point in the Islanders’ season, with a 16-17-6 record and a team that looked disinterested at best on Wednesday, it’s going to take a lot of actions to turn the ship around.

After a scoreless 46 minutes, Jared McCann finally broke the deadlock, scoring off Semyon Varlamov’s shoulder after former Islander Jordan Eberle won a puck battle behind the net.

Just a few minutes later, Vince Dunn doubled the Kraken’s lead with a backhand goal that beat Varlamov from close range. Boos rained down. The fans knew as well as anyone — these Islanders are not a team built to come back from a two-goal deficit in the third period.

Appleton added that empty-net goal with 1.5 seconds left to make it three, and the television camera found Greene on the bench.

As much as a competitive loss on Feb. 2 can be calamitous, this was calamitous. A night after the Islanders looked good against Ottawa, they got shut out by a team whose scoring defense ranks near the bottom of the league.

“We didn’t get to that interior, we didn’t challenge them in any way in that regard,” a scowling Anders Lee said. “A team that’s up and in your face, you trade rushes, you end up not getting enough zone time. You gotta create havoc by getting the puck to the net. I don’t think we did that enough tonight.”

The Islanders want to win low-scoring games, and this one was there for the taking. But they simply could not generate offense. The Kraken only called on Phillip Grubauer to make 19 saves, few of them challenging, compared to Varlamov’s 28.

For the first two periods, this was as lifeless a game as has taken place at UBS Arena this season. It was slow, boring and grinding. Repeatedly, Trotz called out the effort, saying such a game would ruin his holiday.

“I’ll have this taste in my mouth [during the break],” he said. “I can’t speak for the players or anybody else.”

In the third period, things finally came apart. Despite playing nearly the entire period with a deficit, and nearly two minutes at six-on-five, the Islanders were outshot 11-8 in the last 20 minutes.

The Islanders, despite a flailing first half punctuated by an awful record against contending teams, had at least been held up by a sterling record against the teams they were supposed to beat. On Wednesday, the Kraken took a flamethrower to that tepid silver lining.

It’s true that the Islanders had a host of uncontrollable factors working against them this year, but the lineup they rolled out on Wednesday was fully healthy, at home and still prone to all the same problems as before. Trotz said lineup changes are on the table upon the team’s return from the All-Star break.

“I’m pissed off right now,” he said. “Plain and simple.”

He had good reason to be. The Islanders started slow and stayed that way. They struggled to get the puck up the ice. When they did, they rarely challenged Grubauer. They defended hard enough, but played without inspiration. And when the Kraken finally broke through, it only took 2:31 for their lead to double.

It was hard to watch. For Islanders fans, so was the first half of the season.