The New Jersey Devils escaped with a win over the St. Louis Blues. But that didn’t stop Sheldon Keefe from blasting his team.
New Jersey may have won 5-4, but they let the Blues give them far more trouble than they needed to. That prompted Keefe to call his team out postgame.
Via Marc Ciampa of NewJerseyDevils.com, Keefe said, “Two points are great, but you don’t leave this one feeling very good.”
But he wasn’t finished. Keefe went on to say, “We just started making it up and tried to see how cool we could be. And yeah, that’s not winning hockey.”
The Devils Are Allowing An Unfortunate Trend To Develop
The Devils are making a habit of building multi-goal leads and watching them disappear. On Tuesday, they led 3-1 over the Edmonton Oilers, only to escape with a shootout win.
While the Oilers aren’t a team you let back into games, neither are the Blues. Just last week, St. Louis snuck up on and stole a game from the Detroit Red Wings in a massive comeback.
On Thursday, the Devils led 4-1 in the third period. Then they allowed three unanswered goals in a 3:08 span. St. Louis forced overtime, but Jesper Bratt rescued the Devils when he scored on a wrist shot at the 1:26 mark.
A team can only play this way for so long before opponents start beating them in what were otherwise winnable games. New Jersey had a chance to put away one of the NHL’s best scoring units on Tuesday, and they let them back into the game.
Letting the Blues claw their way back in with three unanswered goals in such a short span? The Devils must find a way to play a better 60 minutes of hockey before it turns into a problem.
St. Louis is 19th in the NHL with 49 goals scored. That number averages to just 3.06 goals a game. In short, the Blues aren’t the best team in the league from a scoring standpoint.
But, as the Blues have shown, they can sneak up late in games and steal two points. The Devils didn’t let that happen, but they got dangerously close.
Keefe’s Comments Were Justified Given New Jersey’s Play
The Devils were fine shooting the puck, with 36 shots on goal and 16, nine, and 10 shots in each of their three periods. They had one in overtime.
The Devils stifled St. Louis with just four shots allowed in the first, before the Blues outshot the Devils 28-20 (27-19 in regulation) in the final 40 minutes and overtime.
Do the math, and that is 13.5 shots per period in the last 40 minutes of regulation. If the Devils were facing a top-10 scoring team? There is a good chance they weren’t skating away with the win.
On Saturday, they will face the New York Islanders, a team that is 28th in scoring with 42 goals this season. New York has posted just 2.8 goals per game in their first 15 contests. If there is one team to get back on track against in the third period, it is the Islanders.
If the Devils jump out to another multi-goal lead and let New York back into the game late, chances are, Sheldon Keefe will let them hear about it. Especially after it happened twice in the previous two games.
Devils’ Sheldon Keefe Delivers Scathing Message After Win Over Blues