Lane Lambert laughed when the question was asked because there wasn’t much else to do.

As he’d pointed out toward the end of his press conference following Wednesday’s practice, the Islanders have gotten points in nine of their past 10 games. Unlike approximately 99 percent of those scenarios, though, the coach was not answering questions about how well his team was playing but about all the opportunities they had squandered. 

Have the past 10 games, over which the Islanders hold a 5-1-4 record, felt like a success to him?

“I guess part of it does, for sure, because we’ve done so many positive things,” Lambert said. “If we clean up an area [the third period] which clearly needs to be cleaned up — and we will — there’s a lot of positives to build on.”