Devils Playoff Preview: Do They Have Enough To Weather The Storm?
The colloquialism goes that you throw out everything that occurred before the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It’s an entirely new season with different levels of intensity than one sees during the regular season, especially for those who had nothing to play for during the slog to the finish line.
That’s the hope on which the Devils are grasping, for they will be heavy underdogs in their first-round meeting with Carolina, a rerun of the 2023 second round in which the Hurricanes won fairly easily in five games.
New Jersey split the four regular season matchups with Carolina, with each club winning their home games. However, the two haven’t met since December 28, and the Devils today might as well be an entirely different club.
After defeating the Canes the prior evening, the Devils proceeded to go 18-22-4, losing All-Star center Jack Hughes and top four defensemen Dougie Hamilton and Jonas Siegenthaler to injuries along the way. Only four of those 18 victories came against teams with a winning record. If not for the incompetence of the Metropolitan Division competitors chasing them, the Devils (42-33-7, one point off my 42-32-8 preseason prediction) would be packing their belongings for a second consecutive long offseason instead of preparing for playoff hockey this weekend.
Hamilton and his booming shot returned for New Jersey’s meaningless 5-2 loss to Detroit in the season finale at Prudential Center, which will send the struggling rotating cast of sixth d-men to the press box. It will also enable New Jersey to put out a lineup with only two players, wing Paul Cotter and defenseman Johnathan Kovacevic, without any postseason ice time on their resumes.
Make no mistake, this was supposed to be a “win-now” team, with General Manager Tom Fitzgerald quite active last offseason to address what he felt were the two areas that held the club back during the first time these two clubs faced off—goaltending and being hard to play against.
Lets’ address these one at a time:
Goaltending
Fitzgerald traded New Jersey’s 2025 first rounder and defenseman Kevin Bahl to Calgary last June to get Jacob Markstrom for the specific purpose of having him man the Devils’ net at this time of year. Markstrom, 35, doesn’t have extensive playoff experience—just 26 starts during his two postseason trips—but he is known for his ability to steal games with highway robbery-type saves.
Markstrom got off to a tremendous start this season, nearly going toe-to-toe with Winnipeg’s Hart Trophy candidate Connor Hellebuyck through late December. But like his team, Markstrom’s game fell off a bit, and then he got hurt, sustaining an MCL sprain that kept him out of action for about six weeks.
It’s been up-and-down since his return on March 2, with a few more downs than you’d like to see as he enters the postseason. When accounting for the whole season, Markstrom has been about a league average goalie in everything from save percentage to NaturalStatTrick.com’s goals saved above average metric.
That might not cut it, because that’s pretty much how Carolina’s tandem of Pyotr Kochetkov and Frederik Andersen is viewed. The Hurricanes have alternated their two netminders since the league’s return from the Four Nations Face-off in February. Most pundits believe Andersen, who missed almost three months earlier in the season after undergoing knee surgery, will get the nod for Game 1 because of his steadier reputation.
A Carolina switch to Kochetkov mid-series wouldn’t be deemed a panic move; in fact, it’s kind of expected given Andersen’s durability question. That’s not the case with the Devils, since Jake Allen isn’t Akira Schmid, who came off the bench as a rookie to swing the 2023 Eastern Conference quarterfinal series against the hated Rangers in New Jersey’s favor. Allen, 34, may have a Cup ring, but he hasn’t appeared in a playoff game in five years.
The bottom line is that the Devils will need Markstrom to stand on his head a few times to have any chance of hanging with the Canes, and it’s not clear that he’s up for it.
Hard To Play Against
I’m not a fan of this hockey cliché, which is also bandied about incessantly by those in organizations outside of New Jersey. Everyone knows the sport is a grind, especially come playoff time. The physicality ratchets up while the time and space required to be creative with the puck on your stick dwindles. Those clubs that can win wall battles to end plays in the defensive zone and extend shifts on the other end do have an advantage.
However, let’s not discount the speed and skill component of the elite teams. I’ve argued since the Devils’ loss to Carolina that Fitzgerald overcompensated—he was too willing to sacrifice talent with the puck in the name of getting “harder”, even if it meant bringing in useless guys like Kurtis MacDermid.
The result was a team in Fitzgerald’s image—the Devils’ commitment to defending helped them place fifth in goals allowed per game, yet the scoring dropped to 18th from fourth two seasons ago. By the way, they were a disappointing 14th in the league in goals for per game when Hughes went crashing into the end boards in Vegas on March 2.
But understandable given the lack of production in the bottom six. Now without Hughes, the team is overly dependent on its top line with Nico Hischier and Jesper Bratt and its third-ranked power play. All the banging and sound positional play isn’t by itself going to generate the goals needed to stick with Carolina.
The Devils will be hard-pressed to match the Canes’ frenetic style, especially at home where they went 31-9-1, the third-best home record in the league. Carolina is known for pumping shots from every angle—they’re atop the league rankings in virtually every NST category, including Corsi, scoring chances percentage, and expected goals for percentage. Though for some reason their power play stunk this season, they owned the NHL’s best penalty kill percentage, about two points over New Jersey’s second-ranked success rate.
Those pointing to Carolina’s similar April slump (2-5-1 compared to New Jersey’ 2-4) as a sign of their vulnerability, go back to the first paragraph. The Hurricanes are going to be very hard to play against.
Prediction: Carolina in 5