Johnsson-On-The-Spot Boosting Injury-Plagued Devils
Sometimes, it takes more than a season for puck luck to even out in hockey.
Take the case of Andreas Johnsson, for instance. The Devils left wing, who was acquired from Toronto 13 months ago in a one-for-one trade for Joey Anderson, was snakebitten all last season. A 20-goal scorer in 2018-19, Johnsson tallied just five goals in 50 games in his first season as a Devil.
Worse, to the wrath of Devils fans who believed a fire hydrant could redirect more pucks into the net if they skated nearly 280 minutes alongside elite playmaking center Jack Hughes, according to NaturalStatTrick.com, Johnsson was choking away glorious scoring chances on many nights. The 7.7% shooting percentage that was a low for his four-year career didn’t include all the mishits that never even made it on goal.
Fast forward to the start of this season and now Johnsson can’t miss. The puck has been finding his stick at just the precise moments for him to explode with six goals in his first 11 games, including a pair in the Devils’ wild 7-3 victory over Florida on Tuesday at The Rock.
The Panthers may have been affected by playing on a back-to-back and third game in four nights, but the Devils entered the contest without Hughes, top pair defenseman Dougie Hamilton, and left wing Miles Wood, the team’s co-leader in goals last season. The talent gap between the Panthers, who had gone 8-0-0 when scoring first until Tuesday, and the youthful Devils (eight of their 18 skaters had less than 100 games of NHL experience) was still quite vast.
It's hard to imagine the Devils knocking off such an opponent or being 6-3-2 at this stage without such a production boost from Johnsson, whose outburst, oddly enough, has emerged despite only playing 2:22 this season with Hughes, who dislocated his shoulder in the second period of Game 2 and will be out at least another four weeks. The vast majority of Johnsson’s ice time has come on rookie Dawson Mercer’s wing.
Mercer, though, has assisted on only one of Johnsson’s goals, off a busted play rush opportunity that tied Tuesday’s contest at 3-3. In typical Johnsson fashion, Mercer appeared to lose the puck in the slot only for it to land right on Johnsson’s stick at the bottom of the left circle. With one quick flick, Johnsson beat Florida goalie Spencer Knight.
The Devils were also beneficiaries of another Johnsson-on-the-spot sequence in the first period when winger Jesper Bratt’s shot from in front on a Devils power play ricocheted off Knight and found Johnsson among three Panthers defenders in the vicinity. Again, Johnsson made no mistake and tied the game at 1-1.
These were the same type of chances that Johnsson was flubbing most of last season. Since it’s not like he’s going to beat a goalie from 50 feet out like Alex Ovechkin or stick-handle his way through to the net like Connor McDavid, if Johnsson is going to score at all, it’s going to be from the dirty areas in front of the net.
One reason why Johnsson got a mulligan this season—other than the two years at a $3.4 million AAV the Devils are on the hook for—was that even though he was slumping in the individual stats departments (his mere six assists total was also alarming), he was a positive play driver. He was third among the team’s forwards in Corsi For percentage and the Devils outchanced their opposition 265-218 when he was on the ice at 5-on-5 last season, per Natural Stat Trick. On a team that finished with the NHL’s third-fewest points, Johnsson’s metrics could not be dismissed.
Johnsson is recording similar ratios to start this campaign, but the huge difference for the Devils is he’s now impacting the scoreboard as well. After the win over the Panthers, Devils coach Lindy Ruff credited Johnsson for putting in the work to improve his skating and conditioning this offseason. In the end, whether Johnsson’s surge is because “it’s better to be lucky than good” or “luck is the residue of design” doesn’t really matter.