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Coming out of the bye week the New Jersey Devils laid an egg losing 4-1 to a San Jose Sharks team that was in the latter half of a back-to-back.
Including Calgary's 5-0 loss to Arizona last night, teams coming out of the bye are 3-8-1 and have routinely lost by multiple goals, so perhaps we should give the Devils a bit of a break for their last performance.
In any case, they have a good opportunity to rebound this evening when they host the Colorado Avalanche.
The Avs have some high-end talent but there's not much of value surrounding them. Couple a lack of talent with poor goaltending and it's not hard to see why the Avalanche have won just 15 times in 53 games.
I don't see the Devils as a playoff team -- I don't think they can string together wins and several teams around them are heating up -- but if they're going to make things interesting they need to take advantage of lay-up games such as this.
Here are the expected line combinations for New Jersey:
Taylor Hall - Travis Zajac - Kyle Palmieri
Miles Wood - Adam Henrique - Mike Cammalleri
Pavel Zacha - Jacob Josefson - Stefan Noesen
Joseph Blandisi - Sergey Kalinin - P.A. Parenteau
Andy Greene - Ben Lovejoy
Seth Helgeson - Damon Severson
John Moore - Steve Santini
Cory Schneider
And the expected lines for the Avalanche (via dailyfaceoff.com):
Gabriel Landeskog - Nathan MacKinnon - Mikko Rantanen
Mikhail Grigorenko - Matt Duchene - Matt Nieto
Blake Comeau - John Mitchell - Jarome Iginla
Andreas Martinsen - Carl Soderberg - Joe Colborne
Nikita Zadorov - Francois Beauchemin
Fedor Tyutin - Tyson Barrie
Mark Barberio - Cody Goloubef
Jeremy Smith
A few notes:
1) Smith will be making his first NHL start tonight. He has spent the last eight seasons playing in the AHL, or ECHL, and has played for five different organizations in that span so he's had a long journey here. While he is a good story, he is also a guy with a .911 save percentage in the AHL and doesn't have the most promising of futures in the NHL. The Devils need to make life as difficult as possible by getting pucks and bodies to the net any chance they get.
2) The Avalanche are last in the NHL in goals with 107 and have struggled at 5v5 all season. The Devils need to stay disciplined, unlike what they did vs San Jose, because Colorado won't get many chances beyond the ones they're spoonfed.
3) Hall has five points in his last five and 20 shots in his last four. Against a bad, slow blue line he should have a field day.
Tonight's game is scheduled for 7:00 and can be seen on MSG and Altitude.
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