NOW DEVS MUST
Bad bounces, and even worse odds
W e keep thinking we know which team wears destiny’s anointed hockey jersey in these Stanley Cup playoffs, and then we’re proven dead wrong again. It was the Rangers first and then it was the Devils and now it looks as if the Kings have come out of the West, from that No. 8 seed, and nobody can beat them.
The Devils were the better team Saturday night for much of Game 2, especially in the third period, and it didn’t matter a lick in a 2-1 loss. Jeff Carter circled behind the net, recovered the puck he had shot moments earlier and put it past Marty Brodeur for the winner at 13:42 of the first overtime. “The puck popped out to me,” Carter said. That’s the way it works.”
The math is now stark for the Devils, harsh and desperate. After losing a second straight game at home, the Devils must win four of the next five games. They probably will need to take two of three in Los Angeles and both games at the Rock against a clockwork opponent that remains freakishly undefeated on the road in the postseason.
They will need to do this beginning Monday at the Staples Center, where everything about the Stanley Cup Finals will have to change radically, in a hurry. The Devils must finesse and finish some open shots and the Kings must forget how to hit all their marks like perfectly programmed X’s and O’s on Darryl Sutter’s greaseboard.
Again Saturday, the Kings sealed off the lanes and clogged the crease. They blocked shots with their sticks, not their bodies, but blocked 19 of them all the same. Their goaltender, Jonathan Quick, cleaned up the scraps. The hockey being played was every bit as frustrating to watch as Rangers-Caps, though constipated in a different way.
“That’s the bounces in hockey,” the Devils’ Stephen Gionta said. “One day they’re with you and the next they’re going against you.”
The puck bounced wrong when Ilya Kovalchuk hit the crossbar with 20 seconds left in regulation. It bounced the wrong way when Carter flung it toward the cage.
“We had five guys collapse around the net,” Devils coach Peter DeBoer said. “They found a way to get the puck through.”
The Devils now dangle in a position far more perilous than ever before in this postseason. They got here, to this craggy brink, with a slow start in Game 1 and then a couple of tough breaks in Game 2.
They insist, however, they are not done with this championship series.
“I don’t believe in must games until we’re down three,” Zach Parise said.
Brodeur said more or less the same thing, though he had confessed something very different after Game 1.
“Against a stingy team like L.A., getting off to an 0-2 start would be a tough one to overcome,” Brodeur had said before this second setback. “This is in the back of our heads a little bit.”
Now it is in the front of their brains, for sure. The Devils must surely comprehend their dilemma, understand the math. And as they sink, as this series becomes more of a foregone conclusion, the NHL suffers. The Stanley Cup Finals are losing steam. The Devils and Kings may be part of the disease, not the cure. Hockey could use a large dose of Penguins and Flyers, but we all know how those two teams fared this spring. BC drew a measly 1.8 Nielsen rating nationwide for Game 1 of the Finals, representing about 2.9 million viewers. That was down nearly one-third from last year’s Finals involving the Bruins and Canucks, more watchable teams from more conventional hockey markets.
Maybe the whole world isn’t tuning in, but the Devils need to show something extraordinary in Game 3, or they may have played their last home game of the season.
“Tonight was heavy lifting,” Sutter said. “It was along the boards. Their defense was coming down. Quite honestly, for a good part of two periods, they were controlling that part of the boards. You know what? We’ll have our work cut out going home.”
A lot of work, a little luck. The Kings are the team of destiny, until further notice.
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