New Jersey Devils: 5 Ways To Survive Without Jack Hughes and Dougie Hamilton

1. Fix Special Teams

There is no more important aspect to the Devils’ game that needs fixing more than special teams. Lindy Ruff’s system is working perfectly with this team at 5v5. They are a driver of chances over and over again when at even strength. They are tilting the ice in their favor with just about every single line.

Then someone gets a penalty, and the entire playbook goes out the door.

How can a team that generates so many chances be so bad when they have a man advantage? The Devils are scoring on just 13% of their power plays, and somehow it feels like it’s worse than that. The goals they do get on the power play feel lucky. The system is disjointed, and the players don’t seem to trust what they are doing. Nico Hischier said the team doesn’t have “confidence” in the power play after Tuesday’s loss to the Ducks.

The Devils need to fix it and fast. If they can’t get the power play closer to 20%, then it will be really hard to generate offense in general. It’s already hard to do it without Hughes running the top line or Hamilton creating from the blue line. Now they can’t get chances from the power play?

Then, there’s the penalty kill. They allow a power-play goal 28 percent of the time. The PK actually looked decent to start the season, but it’s fallen off a cliff in the past week. Now, it’s ranked fifth from the bottom of the league, and that’s because most of the league has been awful at stopping power-play goals.

The Devils special teams need to be middle of the pack. They can’t survive these injuries if they don’t fix these two units immediately.