Devils Respond With Snarl And Skill
For the Devils, the Four Nations Face-Off tournament can’t come soon enough. They are in dire need of the 13-day break to heal. Among those banged up for extended periods include two of their four players who were honored with selections to the event, goalie Jacob Markstrom and center Erik Haula. And that doesn’t include New Jersey’s indispensable captain Nico Hischier, whose native Switzerland wasn’t invited but would likely have had to miss it anyway with an upper body injury from a crosscheck in Montreal on Saturday.
Unfortunately, the NHL schedule rolls on for another 10 days, so the Devils have to make do with what they have. And besides some high-end talent at the top of the lineup, what they have is some snarl, even if it’s been mostly missing since the early portion of the season.
I’m guessing Devils General Manager Tom Fitzgerald had a big smile on his face after his club rebounded from being stifled by the Flyers twice this month, including Monday’s 4-2 defeat in Philadelphia, with a 5-0 thrashing at Prudential Center on Wednesday night. Fitzgerald went overboard last offseason to bring in players that are “hard to play against.”
Except the Devils (29-18-6) had seen some of their hardness diminish since the Holidays, going 4-7-3 in their last 14 games leading up to Wednesday to drop into third place in the Metropolitan Division. All while the injuries began to mount.
Devils Head Coach Sheldon Keefe figured out a way to staunch the bleeding…by extracting blood from his opponent. It turned out that the best way to get such a frustrating team off their game was to go straight through them. The result: New Jersey’s best game in about a month.
You could see the enhanced physicality from the opening few minutes. It wasn’t just the insertion of goon Kurtis MacDermid into the lineup; guys like Timo Meier and Tomas Tatar were bowling people over.
The turning point had to be Devils defenseman Brenden Dillon’s hit on Philadelphia’s third-leading scorer Owen Tippett shortly after New Jersey took a 1-0 lead in the first minute of the second period on Ondrej Palat’s power play goal. While Flyers Head Coach John Tortorella admitted during his postgame press conference that the puck was in the vicinity at the time, I felt the Devils were fortunate that Dillon wasn’t penalized for leaving his feet.
Tippett, meanwhile, was escorted off the ice and did not return, and from there, the Devils were further emboldened. Thirteen minor penalties were called during the second period alone, eight of them for roughing. Whereas the Devils had minimal responses to Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler’s high hit that knocked out Nathan Bastian on Monday night, they made it their business to take some liberties in Wednesday’s payback.
The tenacity translated into a higher battle level in front of both nets, especially in the 4-goal barrage during the second period. Palat’s goal was the result of doggedly swatting a loose puck in the slot, as was Bastian’s power play marker midway through the period.
Did MacDermid’s presence really have any impact on the outcome? That’ hard to say, since the Devils lost four of the last five games he dressed and his expected goals for percentage when he was on the ice at five-on-five was a putrid 18.7%. However, Keefe did give him 11:08 of ice time, the most he’s had all season by nearly two minutes and the first time he’s seen double digits in minutes in a game in about 21 months. With the game no longer in doubt late in the third period, Keefe gave him 49 seconds of power play time as a reward.
Keefe, though, went out of his way after the game to say that his club couldn’t play with that level of intensity and emotion every night. Not only can it wear a team out, but it exposes the players to even more injuries.
But there has to be a middle ground so that their elite talent can be the difference makers. Lost in the kerfuffle of Wednesday’s extracurricular activities was the brilliant plays by Luke Hughes and the Meier/Dawson Mercer and Jesper Bratt/Jack Hughes combinations that created the other three Devils goals.
The Devils have four more games before the break, possibly all without Hischier, who ordinarily is counted on in every situation but has been deemed “week-to-week.” The team might not have the same feistiness when they visit Buffalo on Sunday as they just did against their long-time rival, but the trick to staying on a winning path in Hischier’s absence will still be whether they bring their snarl to complement their skill.