The New Jersey Devils were coming off a high on Thursday. They had a huge win against the Pittsburgh Penguins, beating Sidney Crosby’s team 6-1. Nico Daws looked very good after a layoff that lasted more than a week. It was great to see that the Devils had a reliable goalie performance for once. Daws stopped 37 of 38 Penguins shots. The Penguins didn’t play a great game, but they still had eight high-danger chances. Daws was able to stop all of the chances besides one.
On Friday night, the opposite happened. Jon Gillies seemed like he was letting every good chance in, and he added a few bad chances as well. The Devils needed any stop from Gillies, but he couldn’t do it. The Devils had one less goal than the Chicago Blackhawks when not accounting for empty-net goals.
Let’s look at the numbers on Gillies Friday night. He faced 35 total shots. 18 of those shots were considered “low danger” by Natural Stat Trick. On the other side, Kevin Lankanen faced 34 shots and also faced 18 low-danger shots. Here is the difference, the Blackhawks had 10 medium-danger chances, and they scored on three of them. The Devils only had one goal on their medium-danger chances.
Four of the Blackhawks’ goals failed to come on high-danger chances. It’s one thing if the Devils defense made a mistake (which they made a few on Friday night), but it’s another thing to just let any old shot to make it to the back of the net. That gives the other team confidence to just throw anything at the net, knowing it has a possibility to go in.
Over the past month, Gillies has played in eight games, and he’s faced 247 shots. Of those, 67 shots were of the high-danger variety. He’s been average in stopping those shots. However, about half of the goals Gillies allowed over the past month were either low-danger or medium-danger shots against. We don’t need those stats to tell you Gillies is letting in soft goals. Everyone can see it clear as day.
There was a time when Gillies seemed like someone worth sticking around. Tom Fitzgerald looked like a genius for finding this player who could at least get the Devils to the end of the season for absolutely nothing. From December 1st to January 26th, Gillies had a 3.72 goals saved above average. That was the best of the four goalies who played at the time. He had a .900 save percentage and an .897 high-danger save percentage during that almost two-month stretch.
This current stretch showed that this was all a ruse. Gillies was a flash in the pan that can no longer win games. The Devils scored five goals on Friday night, and it never seemed like they actually had a chance with how Gillies was playing. Patrick Kane took the game over, and an empty-net goal secured the hat trick. It was not a good performance, and the lights are about to go out on Gillies’s time with the Devils.
The issue here is the Devils don’t have a better option. Akira Schmid has been just as bad in net. With the COVID postponements from earlier in the season, the Devils have seven back-to-back games from now until the end of the season. There isn’t a lot of extended breaks, either. The Devils need to find a way to give the team at least a semblance of a chance to win. When Jack Hughes has three points, Jesper Bratt has two goals, and Jonas Siegenthaler scores his first goal of the season, the Devils should win every single time.