The curse of the slow begins… again

One of the sticking points that doomed the 2023-24 New Jersey Devils was their inability to start games strong. They conceded the first goal countless times and couldn’t recover enough to win games. This is something they had to deal with and work on if they wanted to improve and become a playoff team again this season.

Well, as December begins, the Devils have certainly turned a corner in terms of their position as playoff contenders. They are playing much better hockey than last season and it shows in the standings. However, in recent games this team has once again fallen into the bad habit of slow starts. This was most evident in the last two games where they were down by multiple goals very early against both St. Louis and Detroit. They are better than both teams, but at the start they seemed to be the far inferior team and it was a struggle. They couldn’t recover at all against St. Louis despite dominating possession the rest of the game, and thanks to an outstanding power play they managed to tie the game late in the first period yesterday.

If we take a look at the last five games the Devils have played, (looking at Corsi’s attempts) they have only come out strong in one of them. Check out the Corsi graphics for each game thanks to Natural Stat Trick:

Going back to the earliest game, that was against Carolina on the 21st. In terms of possession, they had a really poor performance in the first half, they were pinned back for most of the first period, especially later on. They scored a goal against that run of play, but it wasn’t great. It wasn’t until the second second that they turned the game around and really made it the team with the best possession of the ball in the league. The game after that was the Washington game two days later, and that was the only one where they really started strong. They were dominant in the first half of the first period against Washington until they eventually lost the lead and never got it back, especially when they took the lead and played more defensively in the second half. But it’s the only game that bucks this current trend.

Following that win, they earned a commanding win against Nashville last Monday. However, in the first 10 minutes of the game they were again not as dominant as in the previous game. Nashville maintained a slight early possession advantage and scored early to take the lead before the Devils clamped down and took control for the remaining 50 minutes. It was a bad omen that finally reared its ugly head against St. Louis on the eve of Thanksgiving. The Devils were completely miserable in the first 10 minutes of the game, and even as they began to turn the possession battle around, they still allowed a third goal late in the first minute. It was a terrible start from which they were unable to recover, although they finished the game with a +41 Corsi lead.

Yesterday they got off to a very bad start again. The graphic there is slightly different, it only shows the first period. I’m writing this while watching the game (just saw the goal from Noesen’s leg in the second period that gave them their first lead of the day). But what you see is similar to what we saw in St. Louis. The first 10 minutes are very bad, and it wasn’t until the last 5 minutes of the first that they finally turned things around and beat a Detroit team that had been a poor possession team all year.

The good news is that they’re playing Washington again today, the team they started well against recently. Maybe they can do that again tonight, which would be a welcome change from the constant struggle to get back into games. They need to play better in the first 10 minutes of games, they can’t start as slow as before. It’s not a recipe for success. They have the roster to handle it on many nights, but it will never work consistently again, and it would set them up for playoff failure if it happened again in April and beyond. This needs to be corrected. Let’s hope the correction starts tonight.