Slumping Devils Should Be Worried More About Rejuvenating Their Game Than The Standings
Despite a historic turnaround this season, the Devils aren’t where they want to be with the playoffs two weeks away.
They certainly aren’t showcasing their best hockey, posting a 4-5-2 mark since March 14. Over the weekend, they were able to play loose against the tanking Black Hawks on Saturday night and still come away with a 6-3 road victory. But on the back end of a rough back-to-back at Winnipeg on Sunday, the Devils paid the piper. New Jersey suffered its worst loss of the season, 6-1, that was notable only for captain Nico Hischier’s goal with 13.9 seconds remaining to avoid their first shutout.
Games like Sunday’s are bound to happen over the course of an 82-game season. The Devils just finished playing 18 games over the last 33 days that included four sets of back-to-backs and only a single break consisting of two days off between games. No wonder they looked spent on some nights.
Fortunately, one of New Jersey’s rare quality performances in this stretch came in Thursday’s 2-1 win over the Rangers. It enabled the Devils (48-21-8) to maintain their slim lead over New York for second place in the Metropolitan Division and the resulting home ice advantage for the highly-anticipated first-round series.
With five games remaining, though, the standings should be the least of the Devils’ concerns. They simply have to get to act together, for the slightly pro-home team crowd at Prudential Center when the Rangers visit won’t be sufficient to save them from an early exit.
From looking at the conventional and advanced stats, not a whole lot stands out as to where the Devils are falling short. In the last 11 games, they are second in expected goals for percentage and high danger scoring chance percentage, per NaturalStatTrick.com. Their goaltending and special teams haven’t been great, but not worse than middling. Yet they are last in both high danger shooting percentage and high danger save percentage.
In other words, they’ve been horrendous at finishing off their Grade A scoring opportunities while also digging too many pucks out of their own net during the fewer chances they give their opponents.
What’s different about this stretch from prior slumps is that in the contests with postseason implications, there tends to be more disciplined checking that yields fewer of those prime scoring chances. And when the Devils fail to execute their defensive structure, be it not tracking back against opponents’ rushes, botched clearance attempts, or blowing block-out assignments at the net front, the consequences are usually more dire.
The team’s best defensive pairing in the last 11 games, oddly, has been the third duo of Damon Severson and Kevin Bahl. Even during Sunday’s debacle, the pair owned an 80.7 expected goals for percentage and an 81.5 Corsi percentage in 12:48 of five-on-five action, per NST (though Severson was beat on a stretch pass that led to Morgan Barron’s penalty shot goal during the second period).
Unfortunately, that positive development has come alongside the declines in the metrics of the previously stout John Marino/Ryan Graves pairing and the oft-inconsistent Dougie Hamilton/Jonas Siegenthaler duo. These units are more likely to face the oppositions’ top-six forwards, which means that their gaffes are at risk of being more costly.
Up front, Head Coach Lindy Ruff continues to jigger and-re-jigger his line combos. Searching for the proper fit for trade acquisition of power forward Timo Meier seems to be the motivation behind some of the tinkering, though Meier’s production (five goals in his last ten games) hasn’t been all that affected by the constant changes. He was even a force on New Jersey’s third line with Erik Haula and Jesper Boqvist during Saturday’s late binge against Chicago.
In another irony, just as Haula’s stick has started to warm up (his three-game goal streak was snapped in Winnipeg) after a season of jarring ineptitude at hitting wide open nets, his puck possession metrics (including faceoff win percentage) have dropped significantly.
At least Ruff finally acknowledged that Haula belongs in the bottom six, because Ruff is still holding out hope that $6 million AAV free agent acquisition Ondrej Palat will elevate his game to warrant inclusion as All-Star Jack Hughes’ winger. Ruff apparently desires to slot a more defensive-oriented, experienced forward on Hughes’ line. The problem, more so than when Haula was Hughes’ wingman earlier in the season, is that Palat isn’t getting the results on either end.
I’d like to see the following forwards cemented in the top six over these next two weeks: Hischier, Meier, Jesper Bratt, Hughes, Dawson Mercer, and Tomas Tatar. Any three-way combination works for me. Drop Palat with Haula and Boqvist on the third line and roll a fourth line of Michael McLeod, Miles Wood, and Yegor Sharangovich (until Nathan Bastian is cleared to return from his shoulder injury).
You would think that Ruff would ideally like to have faith in his trios’ chemistry by now, barring injuries of course. I don’t know if that’s important to him in his postseason planning. Based on his past behavior, we are as likely to see him take a knife to his lines in Playoff Game 1 as he did in Regular Season Game 77.
Ruff and the Devils have five more games, starting with a Tuesday home affair against Pittsburgh, to figure it out.