For Devils, The Rock Has Been A Hard Place
During the 2023-24 NH: season, home teams went 710-481-121, which is the equivalent of a 58.7% points percentage.
The Devils? Home ice has been more sour than sweet lately. The Rock has been a hard place to scratch out victories, especially when you consider how relatively successful they’ve been on the road during the same period. Just look at the disparities over the last four seasons:
Home Road
2023-24 17-21-3 21-18-2
2022-23 24-13-4 28-9-4
2021-22 16-20-5 11-26-4
2020-21 7-18-3 12-12-4
Through all of last season’s travails, New Jersey still managed to post a winning record—both in real and NHL terms—on the road while coming away with two points in just 17 of 41 home games. Even during their regular season record-setting 2022-23 campaign, the Devils were more road warriors than home cookers.
Who knows what this season has in store for the Devils, but much of how their 4-2 defeat to Toronto in Thursday night’s home opener went down was a continuation of old patterns. As impressive as New Jersey was in sweeping two games from the Sabres at the NHL Global Series in Prague last week, this performance was a stark reminder to new Head Coach Sheldon Keefe as to how much work lies ahead for this group.
For those looking to excuse New Jersey’s loss to the adjustment from their overseas trip—MSG studio analyst Bryce Salvador pointed out that teams returning from Europe won only 9 of their 32 first games back in North America—let’s also consider that the Maple Leafs played a grueling game the prior night in Canada and were starting a goalie making his first NHL appearance.
The bigger problem from my perspective: For whatever reason, the Devils tend to let themselves get too caught up in the emotions of trying to entertain the exuberant crowd in their arena instead of focusing on the details that were so effective against Buffalo. They attempt too many Fancy Dan passes or slick stickhandling moves through defenders that turn pucks over. They don’t have the same defensive discipline and diligence, resulting in excessive high danger scoring chances against. In general, there’s been a lot more wasted activity that achieved little.
I don’t mean to pin this loss on Jack Hughes—he was on the ice for only one of the four goals against—but he is the face of this franchise and no one better exemplifies these higher-risk games at home. He’s always going to be among the league leaders in giveaways just because the puck is on his stick so often. Not that I trust the NHL.com’s giveaway counts, but he did officially average about one more giveaway at home versus on the road last season.
It’s not just the egregious turnovers. If you look at that second Toronto goal, it started with a zone entry down the left side by a single Leafs forward with four Devils back. Only no one took a body as the puck was wrapped around the boards to the right point. By that time, the Devils defensive zone coverage got all out of whack, and an innocent looking shot by Toronto fourth line center Bobby McMann, whom Hughes could have taken out along the wall but chose to skate by to challenge Jake McCabe at the right point, found the back of the net when New Jersey rookie Seamus Casey accidently screened his goalie Jacob Markstrom.
On Toronto’s back-breaking fourth goal, Devils forward Dawson Mercer was skating with counterpart John Tavares on a Leafs rush foray. But, again, instead of playing the body, Mercer swiped his stick at Tavares, who just walked around him and beat Markstrom from the slot.
The overall laziness of these type of sequences had to upset Keefe, and not just because he was facing the club that fired him after five consecutive 100-point season equivalents (factoring in the Leafs pace during the two shortened COVID-19 years). While he said in his postgame press conference that the Devils probably didn’t deserve to get down 3-0 during an ugly first period, he acknowledged that the execution and effort wasn’t hard enough to win anyway.
Keefe had a bit of an astonished look on his face, considering how well things went in Prague. Toronto is clearly a big step up in competition, but he had to be thinking that such a performance wasn’t going to cut it against most NHL teams.
Welcome to New Jersey, Sheldon. Hope you figure out how to make home ice the advantage it has been for other clubs.