G38 New Jersey Devils vs Detroit Red Wings: 24 for 24

It's Nico Hischier's 24th birthday, meaning the Devils are contractually obligated to pick up their 24th win of the season.

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A few notes to get you set for New Jersey vs Detroit:

There’s more than meets the eye

The Detroit Red Wings are not a good defensive team on the surface. At 5v5 they rank 25th in attempts against, and 24th in high-danger chances against, on a per 60 basis. Bad, bad numbers.

We have also seen – with our own eyes – the Devils completely roll the Red Wings on two occasions, seemingly generating dangerous scoring opportunities every shift.

That was against the old Red Wings, though. The old Red Wings attached the anchor that is Ben Chiarot to their best defenseman, Moritz Seider, and turned what should’ve been a quality top pairing into a horrendous one.

Realizing nearly 500 minutes of god awful hockey was enough, the Wings recently pulled the plug on the Chiarot-Seider experiment.

They shifted Chiarot to Filip Hronek’s pairing – which has actually been good thus far – and moved Jake Walman up to the top unit alongside Seider. The early returns have been, um, much better.

Now a Seider-led pairing is playing like a Seider-led pairing should while Chiarot is garnering better results away from top competition.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the version of the Red Wings we see tonight is not the same as the one the Devils outshot by 36 over two games earlier in the year.

That’s not to say the Wings are now the old school Devils, or Jacques Lemaire’s Minnesota Wild, but they’re better equipped to try and slow Jack Hughes and company.

We’ll see how much of a difference it makes.