The Devils are consistently failing to create chances early in games

Be sure to join the Discord channel to talk hockey, and everything else, with me and fellow subscribers.

Today’s post was written by C.J. TURTORO. You can find him on Twitter @CJTDevil.

---

Having watched the last eight games or so of Devils hockey, it might feel like we’re not particularly good at anything. It might also feel as if there are so many problems that it’s rather hard to pick out just one or two that stick out.

In browsing through the last eight games results, I think there are two fairly persistent themes that have truly sunk the Devils.

One of them is the abject failure of the team to generate high-danger chances.

The other is a particular struggle to generate chances (or any offense at all) earlier in games.

Here, I’m going to look at those two ineptitudes as independent and combined failures.

High Danger Chances

While the Devils are uniquely bad at generating chances early, in the aggregate it is something that they have just not been good at at all under Ruff.

This is a huge departure from their style under Hynes, wherein they generally matched opponents in terms of dangerous chances, but lost the possession battle so severely that it didn’t seem to matter.

In 2018, I wrote a pseudo-research piece based on the Devils’ unique excellence in that metric. Here are the Devils statistical footprints in the last 3 Hynes years vs the Ruff years in terms of Shot Attempts vs High Danger Chances:

Ruff has drastically improved the Devils ability to generate offensive possessions. This matters. In fact, I’d say it’s probably more important than the chances.

You can see evidence for this in the fact that the Devils have an xG ratio at around league-average due to their possession. But it’s still extremely frustrating that so much possession results in so few chances.

If you follow Corey Sznajder on Twitter (and you should) you might have seen him post this graph, which I think is emblematic of what the Devils do. The Devils have been the best team in the NHL at entering the zone with possession and one of the teams most likely to generate shots off the rush.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the chaos of the Lindy Ruff Devils -- this is a direct consequence of that chaos. The Devils get the puck, get the zone, get the shot, and get back on D. Their speed allowed them to do this better than their opponents and reep rewards early on.

Two things have happened since then.

First, the team got slower. I don’t know if it’s because half of them had COVID or if it’s the super-condensed schedule, but we’re not retrieving dumps or rebounds with the same tenacity as early in the season.

Second, teams figured out what we were doing and have adapted -- if they can prevent the initial wave scoring opportunity and keep them to the outside until the OZ is controlled, the offense will eventually resort to a low-percentage P.K. Subban slapper and the possession will be aborted.

That is, of course, if they even get to that point. Because as of lately, that’s not been the case early in games.

Early Period Failures

I think that our last solid game was the win against Buffalo towards the end of February. Since then, we’ve played eight games. The 5v5 results of those games broken down by period offer a salient depiction of the Devils early struggles.

Early in games, the Devils are being run through a wood-chipper and laid out as fertilizer for actual NHL teams. While they are racking up the shots and scoring chances late, the lose every discernable statistical battle in both of the first two periods.

They’ve been out-shot by 23, out-chanced by 23, and out-scored by 9. If you look at the GF and GA rates, you’ll see that the Devils are playing at a level that would basically translate to losing a game 1.5 - 3.5 on average. Remember, by the way, that this is only 5v5 -- so the score would likely be much worse given that we have the league’s worst special teams.

This chart is actually even worse than it appears, if you can imagine that. The reason is because these are what’s called “raw” 5v5 stats. It’s more common practice for metrics like these to use numbers adjusted for score and venue.

Teams who are losing are more likely to take risks and shots, teams that are ahead are more likely to fall back. And, as you can see from the first two periods, the Devils have been spending a lot of time losing later in the game.

This puts a bit of a damper on the one possible silver lining to these results which is “we wake up in the 3rd though -- this team has no quit!” Well… no. Not exactly.

We’re riding the score-effect tsunami to look slightly better than we are. This is why our raw Corsi over this stretch is a misleading 52.2% (11th in the NHL) and our adjusted one is 49.1% (18th). And remember, Corsi is the thing we’re good at under Ruff.

And it gets considerably worse if you focus on the high-danger chances, which brings us to the embarrassing crux of the piece.

Generating Danger Early

On average, the Devils are generating less than 4 High-Danger Chances per 60 minutes and allowing over double that in the first period. There were 8 games in this sample, here are how many high-danger chances the Devils generated at 5v5 in the 1st period of each of those games:

1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2. 4, 0

The Devils have failed to register a single high-danger chance in half of their last 8 games. Half! FREAKING HALF?!?!

I mentioned in the first section that the Devils strategy was to use their speed and youth to out-hustle their opponents and get the puck, get the zone, get the shot, and get back on D.

I think it’s time to investigate if, perhaps, we could pause for a minute after the “get the zone” step and attempt to be a little more patient with our offensive zone possessions.

The chaos works when we have legs and people aren’t expecting it. But COVID and the schedule have zapped out legs, and the bubblified divisions mean we’re not surprising anyone. 

There is no reason we can’t continue to wreak havoc in the NZ and DZ, enter the zone cleanly, AND be more controlled once in the OZ.

Continuing to cede all of the early high-danger chances in a game is a great way to dig a hole too big to climb out of, and shake the confidence of your young franchise goaltender.

Hopefully they figure it out soon because, otherwise, a 2020-esque spiral seems not long off.

---

If you enjoyed this post, why not share and help Infernal Access grow?