Lesson For Hughes-Less Devils: Keep It Simple
If the Devils took Tuesday night’s 6-3 loss at Colorado as a proper learning experience, there’s no need for panic.
Playing without their top two centers Jack Hughes and Nico Hischier, New Jersey had little chance of skating stride-for-stride with a dynamic Avs team that came into the game desperate after being shut out in three of their previous four games. They had to play a simpler game, which they did for much of the 1-1 first period.
For whatever reason, the wheels unraveled thereafter, as Colorado was unofficially credited by the TNT broadcast crew with an outrageous ten odd-man rushes for the game. The Avs capitalized on three of them, including a shorthanded breakaway goal in the second period by Miles Wood, a free agent signee after spending the prior eight seasons in the Devils’ organization.
As Devils Head Coach Lindy Ruff noted in his postgame remarks to the media, his club did a lousy job of diagnosing plays, getting caught too far up the ice as Colorado transitioned at warp speed. If you give Avs stars Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, Cole Makar, et al that many head starts, it’s going to eventually bite you.
The issue here is that the Devils have been drilled by Ruff in this go-go style for the last few seasons. He wants his defensemen to jump up into plays, pinch when practical, and generally look to take chances to maintain puck possession, with the understanding that the team’s ludicrous speed will cover for them if they get caught.
It took a few years under Ruff for the team to learn how to push forward without sacrificing the back end, but as New Jersey matured, such freewheeling play brought success, with the Devils breaking their franchise record for points last season and then winning their first playoff series since 2012.
However, without two of their top play-drivers, especially Hughes’ banged-up shoulder, the Devils are short on the skill needed to play that way. It’s one thing when Hughes attempts a risky offensive zone entry or circles back within the zone to the blue line to reset; it’s quite another when it’s Max Willman or Ondrej Palat.
MacKinnon’s back-breaking goal to put the Avs up 5-3 was the result of the failure of Willman, an emergency fill-in, to simply dump the puck in deep; instead, he collided with teammate Curtis Lazar while trying to carry the puck across the blue line. One pass later and Rantanen was in flight the other way on a 2-on-1 with MacKinnon, who neatly deposited Rantanen’s feed after a forehand-to-backhand move past Devils beleaguered goalie Vitek Vanecek.
Simply put, the Devils (7-4-1), even before the injuries, are giving up way too many goals for Ruff’s, or anyone’s liking. They are tied for 24th in the league in five-on-five goals against per game. Sunday’s 4-2 win in Chicago was just the second time all season they have surrendered as few as two goals in a game.
Going into the season. most pundits figured that goaltending was going to be an issue in New Jersey, and it certainly hasn’t been consistent—Akira Schmid and Vanecek are ranked 36th and 40th, respectively, among the 51 NHL goalies with at least 200 minutes played in goals saved above average, per NaturalStatTrick.com. Vanecek is a dreadful 48th in high danger save percentage—his spectacular diving stop in Chicago notwithstanding.
Though you’d hope the Devils’ goalies could keep more of those opponent scoring chances out of the net, it’s hard to blame them. Rather it is the skaters in front of them who need to be more diligent in everything from staying on the right side of pucks, their marking assignments, and puck management. In other words, don’t get caught too far up ice so that opponents can ger behind you, check your guy, and, heaven forbid, don’t turn pucks over.
On offense, it’s not a crime to rely more on the dump-and-chase game like they did during Tuesday’s first period. New Jersey was hard on the forecheck and created many more chances off the cycle as opposed to the rush. At least the power play is still humming—they went 2-for-6 against the NHL’s second-best penalty killing unit coming into Tuesday’s game to maintain their league-leading 41.7% power play conversion rate. That plus banging home a couple of dirty goals every game should be enough to win games with this depleted roster if they can take care of the other end.
At full health, the Devils could get away with a lot of the above defensive lapses because they were so darned talented that those mistakes weren’t that difficult to overcome. Tyler Toffoli’s first period goal, his team-leading eighth of the season, marked just the third time all season that the Devils opened the scoring. Their five wins coming back from 1-0 down are the most in the league in this young season.
Look, the Devils concluded their four=game road trip with four points (2-2), which isn’t awful considering Hischier missed all four games while Hughes was sidelined after a collision with the back boards in Friday’s defeat n St. Louis. It is doubtful that either will suit up for Friday’s return to Prudential Center against Washington and given the absurd state of hockey transparency, it is impossible to ascertain how much longer they’ll both be out.
For the Devils to tread water until their stars return, however, they need to understand that they no longer have such a wide margin for error. Even if that might require some hard rewiring of their instincts.
Call Tuesday’s loss Lesson 1: Keep it simple.
Photo by: AP Photo/David Zalubowski