5 Things We Learned From New Jersey Devils Final Press Conferences

Lindy Ruff made it clear it is his intention to bring back every assistant. The Devils’ special teams were outright terrible, but Ruff was not blaming Mark Recchi or Alain Nasreddine. As you can see with the quote, Ruff called it shared blame.

The Devils are going to finish the season with the worst penalty kill in the league. Only five teams since the 1970s have had a worse penalty kill percentage than the current Devils’ 70.9%. Obviously, there are a lot of factors to make one unit play that badly, especially since the Devils’ penalty kill was actually pretty good the past five years.

If the Devils got a better Mackenzie Blackwood, that would absolutely help, but the numbers show he was hardly the worst part about the unit. According to Natural Stat Trick, the Devils gave up 28 high-danger goals on the penalty kill this season. That’s more than any other team in the league. That’s despite the Devils have 137 minor penalties this season. Only two teams had less. So, the Devils allowed more goals despite giving up fewer opportunities.

As far as the power play goes, only two teams did worse than the Devils 14.9%. Those same two teams were the only ones who had fewer high-danger chances with the man advantage. The Devils only got 59 high-danger chances in 276 minutes of power-play time. To compare, the Boston Bruins got 91 high-danger chances in those same 276 minutes.

The team’s special teams were terrible. Almost everyone said something about it on the podium. The players took most of the blame, but one would expect that from a team like this. Special teams will be a focus this offseason for sure.