DEVILS TEAM SCOPE<\/p>\n
New Jersey has won five of its last six games after defeating Edmonton’s Pacific rivals in the Vegas Golden Knights 5-2 on the road this past Friday, and they’ll look to take advantage of a few days of rest when they open a two-game homestand\u00a0against the Oilers.<\/p>\n
Connor Hellebuyck earned his second straight win since joining the Devils, and\u00a0Arseny Gritsyuk and Jack Hughes each scored twice to help New Jersey improve to 9-5-0. The Devils responded from a 5-2 loss to the Avalanche on Wednesday, but have been building themselves up through some positive early-season growth to make a challenge in the Metropolitan Division this season after missing last year’s playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re developing great confidence around here in our ability,\u201d Head Coach Sheldon Keefe said. \u201cWe had to refocus and get ready for here (after the Colorado loss). It was another really good team. The guys responded the way we wanted. \u2026 In terms of playing with a lead, it\u2019s probably the best third period we\u2019ve had in the season. We couldn\u2019t ask for more in terms of the response.\u201d<\/p>\n
One area the Devils want to improve is special teams, operating at only 16.7 percent on the power play, which is good enough for only 24th in the League, while their penalty kill sits 25th at 70.0 percent.<\/p>\n
Former Oiler Connor Brown was moved to the top-unit power play during Monday’s practice as they look to shake things up ahead of a visit from Edmonton, with the winger having spent time on the top unit last season.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst of all, he brings familiarity,\u201d Keefe said of Brown. \u201cThat group had a lot of success, and we liked it a lot at the end of the season last season.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBrownie’s just a familiar guy that we’ve been with before. We know exactly what he’s going to bring to our lineup,\u201d Jesper Bratt said. \u201cHe has a lot of knowledge, played with some really good players on the power play before too, and I think last year he just helped guys like me, Nico, and Jack, and Luke too, just kind of evolve our game a little bit in the power play and give us a little bit of input to what he has learned over the years and stuff like that.”<\/p>\n
“It could work for us, and I think that last year we really took a big stride there, and I think that that’s kind of what we’re looking for now. Just try to get more into some familiarity and some patches that we were onto last year that can help us get over that hump.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DEVILS TEAM SCOPE New Jersey has won five of its last six games after defeating Edmonton’s Pacific rivals…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":956523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":["post-956522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edmonton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}