The New York Islanders fell 6-3 to the Boston Bruins on Wednesday night, finishing their three-game homestand with a 1-2-0 record.

Brock Nelson (2G, 1A) and Max Tsyplakov scored for the Islanders, but Boston exploded with six goals from Brad Marchand (2G), Morgan Geekie, Pavel Zacha (2G) and Nikita Zadorov, three of which came in the third period. Ilya Sorokin turned away 15 of 20 shots in the loss, while Joonas Korpisalo made 21 saves in the win.

The result is painful for the Isles, who overcame 2-0 and 3-2 deficits to level the score but couldn’t get the job done in a key game against an Eastern Conference opponent neck and neck in the standings.

“We fought back all night tonight, kept tying the game and just couldn’t tie it again in the third,” said captain Anders Lee. “We have to be better, there’s no doubt about that. We don’t win hockey games.”

The Bruins got off to a hot start after Elias Lindholm won the tie in the Isles zone and pointed the puck to Marchand, who made a shot from the high slot to break open the scoring at the 51-second mark.

Justin Brazeau extended the Bruins lead when he beat Scott Mayfield and Dennis Cholowski for control of the puck in the slot to find Marchand, who scored his second goal of the game at 6:31 of the opening frame. Trailing 2-0 on two quick hits from the Bruins superstar, Head Coach Patrick Roy called a timeout to calm his team down.

“We didn’t get off to a good start, we called a timeout because I wanted to make sure we didn’t dig ourselves into too big a hole,” Roy said. “We wanted to give ourselves a chance to stay in that game.”

The timeout was effective and brought some life to the islands. Nelson grabbed the puck near the half wall and chipped it to Tsyplakov, who tapped it with a backhand to beat Korpisalo by five and get the Islanders on the board at 12:50 of the first. The Russian winger almost scored a second goal a few minutes later when he made a slick move to open the ball, but Korpisalo made the stop.