Devils’ Win Streak Comes to End, Blanked by Avs

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! First off, sorry this is a little bit late. I had a family gathering to attend, but we did watch the game and so I have enough info to report on.

The Devils pregame was delayed by about ten minutes because of the Knicks-Lakers game being shown with alternate commentary on MSG+. This is kind of perplexing when you figure that MSG2 was just sitting there with nothing on it while they essentially showed the Knicks game on both MSG and MSG+. But that’s about par for the course with this network.

Anyway, that aside, the Devils were finishing up their road trip in Denver to take on the Colorado Avalanche. The Devils were trying to string together three wins for the first time in the 2019 calendar year. They last did it from December 27 to 31, 2018. They just notched their tenth road win of the season on Friday in Vancouver, which just shows how bad the Devils have been on the road this season.

The Avalanche came away with the 3-0 win, further keeping them in the playoff race and continuing the Devils’ road woes.

The lineup stayed largely the same for New Jersey with John Quenneville missing a second straight game with an upper body injury. Kurtis Gabriel was out on defense with Colton White playing in his second NHL game.

It was back to Cory Schneider for the Devils. He stopped 31 of 33 Colorado shots against for a .939 save percentage on the afternoon. Philipp Grubauer was in for the Avs and he stopped all 22 Devils shots that made it through to him.

On special teams, the Devils went 0-for-4 on the power play with seven shots for. The Avalanche were 0-for-3 with four shots. They also notched three shorthanded shots, all of which Cory got.

The bulk of the scoring came in the second with Tyson Barrie scoring two for the Avs. His first came at 2:22 into the second when Nathan MacKinnon skated the puck through three Devils players and got it Barrie, who was able to fire it by Cory to make it 1-0 Colorado. Sven Andrighetto had the secondary assist on the goal.

The Avs’ second and, in fact, the Avs’ second came at the 11:05 mark of the second when Barrie’s shot bounced off of his teammate and former Devils draft pick Alexander Kerfoot’s leg, then rebounded off of Travis Zajac’s leg and in past Cory. This made it 2-0 Avs and Andrighetto had the lone assist.

The Devils pulled Schneider with about 2:33 left in the game and Colorado would add an empty netter off of the stick of MacKinnon (unassisted) at 18:26. That iced the game for the Avalanche and gave us our final of 3-0.

WIth that empty netter, the Devils were out shot 34-22. They won 59-percent of the game’s faceoffs, but were out hit (22-21) and had less blocked shots (17-15) than the Avs. They did have less giveaways at five to the Avalanche’s 14.

Individual stats saw Damon Severson lead in time on ice with 24:28 (5:01 on the power play and 4:42 shorthanded). Zajac led in forwards’ ice time with 19:01 (4:25 on the PP and 2:53 killing penalties). Severson also led in shots on goal with five, Stefan Noesen led in hits with three, Steven Santini led in blocked shots with three and Michael McLeod and Connor Carrick each led in takeaways with two each.

Next up, the Devils come back east and take on the Capitals at home on Tuesday. That game is at 7:30 PM ET as it is on NBCSN. I will be attending live and will be getting the report up a little bit later. In the meantime, I hope everyone had a very happy St. Patrick’s Day and don’t forget to leave a comment if you wish to.