Sheldon Keefe rips Devils puck battles in loss to Capitals
TLDR: Two days after hanging 7 on the Rangers, the Devils let Washington score 3 times in the second period of a 4-2 loss, and Sheldon Keefe said his team lost every puck battle doing it.
Keefe didn't sugarcoat it. He went straight at the effort, and his summary of the middle 20 minutes was about as blunt as a coach gets in October.
"I just think our checking habits and our puck battles lost, just all those things just added up to easy goals." - Sheldon Keefe #NJDevils
Here's how bad it got. Arseny Gritsyuk opened the scoring at 10:04 of the first and Ryan Leonard tied it late in the period. Then the second started and the Devils disappeared. Ilya Protas scored at 1:16, Dylan Strome at 4:36 and Boone Jenner at 11:14, and an afternoon game in D.C. was over before the second intermission. Keefe went further than just saying the effort was bad. He laid out exactly how a team falls apart: one guy gets beat, someone leaves his own check to cover, and now nobody is on anybody.
That Rangers line is what stings. On Thursday the Devils beat New York 7-1 behind 4 goals in just over 5 minutes, Jack Hughes had the first multigoal game of his career, and Timo Meier was 1 of 5 Devils with 2 assists. That was the tight, give-them-nothing game Keefe was talking about. Against the Capitals it didn't carry over, and Meier boiled it down to the same thing his coach did.
Timo Meier on the second period: "I think it just comes down to the battle. They won more puck battles. They were skating more. We didn’t do a good enough job to win this one." #NJDevils
Jake Allen took the loss after 21 saves, and the goalie pointed to the long change in the second as the moment it went sideways. Washington pinned New Jersey in its own end and cashed in on the turnovers. Allen wasn't buying the third-period push as a consolation either: the Devils outshot the Caps 17-5 in the 3rd, Logan Thompson stopped 16 of them, and Meier's goal didn't come until 19:47, way too late to matter.
"When you get to 4–1 in the NHL, generally, it’s hard to claw back. Guys played hard in the third, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just about putting 60 minutes consistently together. We played a couple good games there the last couple, but we’ve got to keep building." - Jake Allen #NJDevils
Keefe was a little kinder about the 3rd. He said he'd challenged the group after the 2nd and liked how they answered. He also admitted score effects were a big part of it, with Washington sitting back on a comfortable lead. Better than the alternative, sure. But a good final 20 minutes after the game is already gone is the kind of thing a team says when it's 4-4-0, and that's where New Jersey sits now.
That's the problem with this Devils team so far. One night they're running the Rangers out of their own rivalry game, and the next they can't win a loose puck in Washington. Allen's line about putting 60 minutes together is the whole story. Until they string a few complete games together, every blowout win is going to come with an asterisk, and the next game is the test of whether Keefe's message stuck.