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Ilya Kovalchuk

NHL Playoffs 1st Round Preview: New Jersey-Florida

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The Florida Panthers and New Jersey Devils hook up in the Eastern Conference’s under-the-radar playoff series, as the 3rd and 6th seed respectively. The SportsNotebook previews their coming battle…

Both teams are offensive anomalies. Florida is poor offensive team overall, but average in getting shots on goal. The Panthers rank 27th and 15th respectively. New Jersey is not just the inverse of Florida in a general sense—the Devils have a terrible time getting shots, but survive by cashing in their limited chances—but they are the precise inverse. They rank 15th in goals, while being 27th in shots on goal. Teams with the kind of split the Devils have usually have a good individual scorer who can step up, and that’s what Jersey has in Ilya Kovalchuk and Zach Parise. In the case of Florida, their split can be seen as reflective of a good team concept, but a team who needs a finisher. Kris Versteeg and Tomas Fleischmann are nice players, but in over their heads a lead scorer.

New Jersey’s calling card is defensively. NHL observers note that they do an outstanding job of taking all five players and sinking them back on the defensive side. This surely hurts the opportunities for Kovalchuk and Parise for open-ice scoring opportunities, but the defense helps protect an aging Martin Brodeur who’s quite literally been in goal longer than Mariano Rivera has closed games for the Yankees. New Jersey’s defensive concepts have made them second-best in the NHL at preventing shots and they’re in the Top 10 in bottom line of goals allowed.

Florida’s defense is better than their offense, but that’s still nothing to write him about. The Panthers are not a strong defensive team overall, and goalie Jose Theodore can be aggravating, but the flip side is that the reason for the aggravation is that Theodore is capable of playing at a very high level. The prospect of facing a goalie who can play at a much higher level in the playoffs isn’t exactly comforting and that’s what New Jersey is facing.

Special teams present a big edge for the Devils, where they are the NHL’s best at killing penalties, effectively inoculating them at losing games at the hands of an unfriendly official. It’s the kind of team Florida would prefer not to face, as their own power play is the only real offensive strength. On the opposite side, the Panthers have major problems in stopping a power play and if Kovalchuk and Parise can cash in some chances with the man advantage, New Jersey can get a lead and sink back into their tightly wound defense.

Even though the Devils are the 6-seed, they are the superior team here, with Florida’s Southeast Division title giving then an automatic top three seeding. If Florida is going to win this series they have to find a way to draw New Jersey out of their tight defensive strategies and create scoring opportunities. Even if they do, the Panthers still need to light the lamp, something we noted has been an issue this year. Because the Devils style lends itself to close games I think this is going to be a good series, but in the end the 6-seed moves forward.

Going Inside The New Jersey Devils’ February Surge

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The New Jersey Devils have been the NHL’s most significant story in February. As much as the Detroit Red Wings’ home win streak has earned its place in the history books, there’s no story more likely to impact what we see in late April or May than the surge the Devils have put on. Coming from outside the playoff picture, they’ve zoomed up the ladder to be the #4 seed in the East if the postseason began today. New Jersey is tied with Boston for the second-best point total in the conference. And while the 4 thru 7 spots are fluid enough that they can change every few days, the Devils are a comfortable nine points up on the teams fighting to get into the playoffs. Is the surge for real, or is the flavor of the month? The SportsNotebook goes inside the New Jersey Devils.

New Jersey ranks in the middle of the NHL in both goals scored and goals against, but they get there in considerably different ways. This is not an offense that excels by raw volume of shots. The Devils’ are in the lower echelon of the league when it comes to generating attacks on opposing goaltenders, and they have no real signature scorer. While Ilya Kovalchuk and Zach Parise, along with maybe David Clarkson, are the offensive leaders, none would be focal points on the offense of most other playoff teams. On the flip side, the defense does an outstanding job in the area of shot prevention and keeping the jobs of Martin Brodeur and Johan Hedberg a little easier in goal. Brodeur is no longer the elite star he was when he led this team to the Stanley Cup in 1995, and his 90.4% save rate isn’t great—but he is playing his best right now.

After a three-game home losing streak to Philadelphia, Boston and Buffalo, there was no indication the Devils were about to take off. But that’s what happened when the homestand continued against the rival New York Rangers. The Devils, whose power play is a little below average, got a goal with the extra man, then saw Clarkson tie the game with less than a minute left, and then won a shootout. They haven’t looked back since.

Montreal came to town next, and while Jersey fell behind 2-0 and were outshot 30-22, they got a pair of goals from Parise, along with Clarkson on the power play and rallied for the win. They made the short trip to Philly and came blazing out of the gate with three goals in the first, three more in the second and hung on for the 6-4 win. The defensive meltdown in the third certainly doesn’t look good, nor does losing shots 41-31, but the power play was again in high gear, scoring three times. A home win over Pittsburgh was the second straight night for Kovalchuk to both score and have two assists, while the team as a whole was outshot.

On February 7, two days after the Jersey/NYC area had seen the Giants bring home the Super Bowl title, the Devils and Rangers hooked up in Madison Square Garden. The game’s only goal came on a power play effort from Clarkson, and even losing shots 30-22 couldn’t stop Brodeur from getting the shutout Maybe it was a hangover from beating the archrival and #1 team in the East, but Jersey hit a little speed bump the next two games. They lost home dates to St. Louis and Florida, though a shootout in the former game still got them a point. In the Florida loss, the Devils only got one power play chance and won shots 28-20, but still lost 3-1.

Kovalchuk put the team on his back in Buffalo for Valentine’s Day, scoring in the first off the power play and then completing his hattrick in the third with a pair of goals that broke open a tie game. The Devils narrowly escaped a bad Anaheim team at home, going to the shootout for a 3-2 win. They gave up a late third period goal, lost shots by double-digits and had just one power play chance. Then on February 19 in Montreal, the Devils played their cleanest game of this stretch. They didn’t need a power play or Kovalchuk to get any of their three goals and the game ended 3-1. Two nights ago, they beat Toronto 4-3 in overtime, a game they led 2-0 early and 3-2 late before Maple Leaf forward Phil Kessel forced the extra session.

What stands out to me in going through this streak is first off, how dependent this offense is on the power play. This is an anomaly, because the Devils only rank 18th in the league overall here. It’s reasonable to think they will keep winning special teams’ battles as a whole, because the penalty kill team is one of the league’s best. But over the long haul, a team needs to be effective in 5-on-5 play and New Jersey ranks only 21s in this area.

The correlation of shots to goals is just completely inverted on this team and it would seem at least partly traceable to the power play situation. It seems not to matter if the Devils get a lot of shots, what matters is that they come with the man advantage. There’s no mystery here, as its better to get a fewer number of shots that are high in quality, rather than wildly launching pucks at goaltenders. That works about as well as young flamethrowing pitcher just hurling straight heat at big-league hitters. It looks nice and at lower levels it even works, but winning at the highest level requires a little bit more finesse. If that’s what Jersey is doing, more power to them (no pun intended). But I still have to say you rarely see the kind of disparity between shots and goals the Devils exhibit on both sides of the ice.

New Jersey’s current run has made a playoff berth secure, as we move toward the regular season’s final quarter, but I don’t see this win streak as a harbinger of things to come. The dependence on the power play and on the scoring of Kovalchuk, who will never be confused with Evgeni Malkin, is not a sustainable formula and the Devils end up no better than a 7-seed when the postseason begins.