Devils’ Emotional Elimination Of Rangers Produces Negative Carryover Effect For Game 1 Loss To Canes
One of the plot points from the high school football film “Varsity Blues” was when the kids spent the entire night before a big game partying at a strip club and their groggy looks from the exit scene extended to the playing field, where they got obliterated.
That’s what the Devils looked like for the first 22-odd minutes of their 5-1 drubbing in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinal at Carolina on Wednesday night.
Not that the young Devils actually celebrated too much following Monday night’s emotional 4-0 victory that eliminated the hated Rangers in the do-or-die Game 7 of the first round. But from the way they played, it sure looked like they left their game in New Jersey.
The Devils seemed ill-prepared to deal with the different challenges presented by the Metropolitan Division champion Hurricanes, who pressure pucks significantly harder than New York ever did and are known to have a shoot first mentality. For one of the few times this season, New Jersey was the slower team.
The first period was so one-sided that all the Devils could muster was a single shot on goal, and that was from fourth-line wing Nathan Bastian from outside the blue line on a delayed offside, meaning it wouldn’t even have counted had the puck managed to find the back of the net. Thank some solid defensive work by John Marino to keep the score at a somewhat respectable 2-0 at the intermission.
No matter, because a bad break from Devils defenseman Jonas Siegenthaler losing his helmet in a puck battle behind his own net led to Carolina’s third goal, which chased Devils starting goalie Akira Schmid for the second time in three games.
The Devils made a bit of a push afterwards, spurred more by a vicious open ice hit by Carolina forward Jordan Martinook on Siegenthaler. New Jersey’s fourth line of Bastian, Miles Wood and Michael McLeod came on for the next shift and started banging people around like they were the Hanson brothers from “Slap Shot.” It led to Bastian’s nifty breakaway goal.
However, Carolina goalie Frederik Andersen really wasn’t tested all that much in his second game since returning from an illness and an undisclosed injury. NaturalStatTrick.com credited Andersen with five saves off Devils’ high danger opportunities, though I’m hard-pressed to recall a single one. That number is too low anyway for a game of this magnitude—for example, New York’s Igor Shesterkin saw 13 such glorious chances on Monday night, stopping ten.
Don’t bother blaming it on the scratch of 40-goal scoring wing Timo Meier, who was rocked by a high hit from Rangers defenseman Jacob Trouba in Monday’s third period. The Hurricanes are the team hardest hit by injuries for this series, missing forwards Teuvo Teravainen, Max Pacioretty, and All-Star Andrei Svechnikov.
No, this was a game where players 1-through-20 did not show. As Devils Head Coach Lindy Ruff put it in his postgame press conference when responding to a question about pulling Schmid, “I could have taken multiple players out.”
For portions of the game, he did. Ruff went with five defensemen shortly after Carolina’s third goal, with Ryan Graves glued to the bench for about ten minutes. Forward Jesper Bratt received another conspicuous demotion in the third period. It says a lot about the team’s compete level that the gritty but less-skilled Bastian led all wingers in ice time.
And for those wondering whether Ruff will return Vanecek to the starter’s net for Friday’s Game 2, let’s not forget that all hopes of a Devils comeback were extinguished when defenseman Brady Skjei beat Vanecek from the left circle to put the Hurricanes up, 4-1, with a little less than ten minutes remaining. That shot—unscreened and unencumbered by net front presences—has to be stopped.
Any similarity between the starts to this series and the prior one stops at the 5-1 score (New Jersey actually lost the first TWO games to the Rangers by identical 5-1 margins, both at Prudential Center). The Devils never played this poorly in any of their three defeats to New York.
In a sense, that should give Devils fans some hope. We can wait until they drop a game after coming out with the requisite energy before feeling any dread. Like the “Varsity Blues” boys, they have more chances to figure it out.