After a 7-2 loss to the Boston Bruins on Tuesday night, the New Jersey Devils once again failed to string together four consecutive wins, continuing a pattern that's carried on for more than two calendar years.
Collecting four straight victories is nothing to shake your head at, but it's also an achievable benchmark for any competitive team. As of Wednesday morning, 28 of the 32 NHL clubs have managed to win four in a row at least once. The Devils join the Sharks, Blackhawks, and Flyers as the only teams unable to do so this year.
The last time the Devils managed to string more than three wins together was in January of 2023, when the team won five straight en route to a franchise-high 52 victories. It'd be remiss not to mention the record-tying 13-game heater the Devils went on earlier in the 2022-23 season. That was also the last time the Devils made the playoffs, and that team was leaps and bounds ahead of today's roster.
The Devils have had six separate three-game winning streaks this season, but when it comes to the elusive fourth win, New Jersey has come up short every time. Coach Sheldon Keefe acknowledged this is something that's already been discussed in the locker room.
"Obviously, we've been unable to do it all season, so there's something there," Keefe told the media after Tuesday's loss. "To me, yeah there's four games and all that stuff, but it's more about just our inability to just string it together for a long period of time. That's been an issue for us all season and we talked about it this morning. It was a really good opportunity to push through a couple of thresholds here -- to the playoffs, to get to that fourth game, and we're clearly not there."
The Devils have failed to win four games int a row six times this season
Looking at each instance of the fourth game in the sequence reveals more about why it's been such a difficult task. For starters, the opponent has not necessarily been the problem -- entering Tuesday, the Bruins were 1-10-1 in the previous 12 games. Only three of the six teams in this scenario are currently in or vying for a playoff spot.
The Devils have only managed to score nine goals across those six games when the team had a chance to extend a win streak, while allowing a whopping 27 goals against. That includes two games in which New Jersey was shutout as well as two seven-goal blowouts. The power play has also gone 2-for-15 during that stretch.
It's the same reason Keefe alluded to as to why the Devils have struggled playing full 60-minute games: lack of consistency, and being unable to complete the comeback.
Going all the way back to November, when the Devils fell 1-0 to the Sharks, the team outshot San Jose 44 to 27 and simply ran into a hot goaltender in Mackenzie Blackwood. But New Jersey clearly had no shortage of opportunities to tie that game. It was a similar story on December 19, when the Devils went down 3-0 to Columbus and pushed back to make it 3-2 in the dying minutes of the third, but ultimately lost 4-2. New Jersey recorded over 40 SOG in both of those games.
In fact, across all six games, the Devils had a Corsi-for of over 50% in four of them. The quality of play is there in some of these cases, but the key issues are 1.) inability to convert and 2.) defensive breakdowns leading to goals against.
Looking at the 5-2 loss to the Hurricanes on December 28, the Devils actually held a lead at two separate points, going up 1-0 and then 2-1 before allowing four unanswered goals in an eventual 5-2 loss. The second tying goal for Carolina came on a turnover as Ondrej Palat attempted to clear the zone, a familiar scenario thinking ahead to the Bruins game on Tuesday. That's exactly how Boston scored the opening goal: a failed attempt to get the puck to the neutral zone.
The good news in all of this: New Jersey has proven to be capable of getting three wins in a row, and sometimes that's all it takes to put yourself in a comfortable position in a playoff series. When the Devils eliminated the Rangers in the first round of the 2023 playoffs, the club had gone down two games to none before winning three straight and eventually clinching in Game 7.
The team is inevitably going to punch their ticket to the postseason in the coming days, and nobody is expecting the Devils to sweep the Hurricanes in the first round. Perhaps the whole "four-game win streak fiasco" isn't as meaningful in a playoff context. But it does put on display the Devils' lack of consistency, and that's something that could make or break a team in the postseason.