The New Jersey Devils are playing at their worst level of hockey this season. There are two distinct stretches where the team looked awful, and they both coincided with long road trips. The first came on the West Coast road trip, where they got pretty thoroughly beaten by the Avalanche, Sharks, and Ducks, but Jacob Markstrom stole one against the Kings in between.
This looks much worse than that West Coast trip. Jack Hughes got hurt last Thursday at a team dinner, and the Devils have been pretty inept offensively. Sheldon Keefe has been trying to find the right line combinations with Hughes, Cody Glass, and Zack MacEwen missing from the lineup.
The offensive issues stem further than Hughes’s injury. The Devils haven’t been the best finishers. Even Hughes himself has a terrible record of finishing. Despite having 10 goals this season (seven at 5v5), he had instances where he took a ton of shots but never lit the lamp.
Hughes’s offense is the least of the Devils' worries, however. It’s everyone else who needs to finish.
According to Natural Stat Trick, the Devils are one of two teams that are shooting at less than 10% on high-danger shots. It’s led to just 11 high-danger goals at 5v5 despite putting up 183 high-danger chances. Don’t get us wrong, the Devils should be putting up more HDCF this season, but they are also unlucky in those chances. It’s a losing combination.
New Jersey Devils high-danger percentages show that more goals should be expected
Last season, no team had a high-danger shooting percentage lower than 14%. Same goes for the year prior. These things tend to work themselves out, and we expect them to for the Devils this season.
When adding the power play and penalty kill into the equation, it looks even worse. The Devils have a 13.4% shooting percentage at all strengths, which is last in the NHL.
This issue is more than just Jack Hughes. It’s about the finishing of this entire team. It’s Nico Hischier getting pucks in net instead of just on net. It’s Timo Meier continuing to be a high-danger contributor. Stefan Noesen looks like a different player than he was last season after returning from his injury.
The Devils aren’t contributing, and what’s worse, the goalies aren’t stopping the high-danger chances on the other side. For a team like the Flyers, they only have 12 high-danger goals scored, but they’ve only given up 12. The Devils have scored 11, but they’ve given up 28. Only the Oilers have a worse high-danger goals percentage.
The Devils' goalies have a 77.8 high-danger save percentage this season. To look at that a little differently, teams are scoring on 22.2% of their high-danger shots while the Devils are scoring at less than 10% at 5v5. No wonder the losses have been piling up.
Just take their most recent game against the Flyers. They actually had more high-danger chances than Philadelphia, but they lost 6-3.
This is unsustainable from a pure math standpoint. Not only should the Devils have better luck on high-danger chances for the rest of the season, but they should exceed the average to make up for this rough start.