Frank Lorenzo
So far this season, the New Jersey Devils’ have played their best hockey on the road, and they expect to continue that trend tonight as they face the Penguins in the hostile environment of the CONSOL Energy Center (7:00 p.m. Eastern).
So far this season, the New Jersey Devils’ have played their best hockey on the road, and they expect to continue that trend tonight as they face the Penguins in the hostile environment of the CONSOL Energy Center (7:00 p.m. Eastern).
The Devils (4-2-2) are 4-1-0 on the road after Saturday’s 3-2 overtime win in Ottawa, but they haven’t won at home in three games.
“The scoring doesn’t show, but I feel the best I’ve felt in probably the last 10 years,” veteran Jaromir Jagr, who scored the winner against the Senators, told the team’s official website. “I don’t worry about it. I try to play hard every shift. I think I have more confidence. Hopefully, my luck is going to turn the right way, and it did today. Even if the scoring is not there, that’s OK.”
The Penguins (4-2-1) are coming off a 3-0 win over the Predators in Nashville on the weekend.
“We played the right way,” Sidney Crosby said. “We didn’t sit back to play defensively. We play defense with our forecheck and getting sticks in lanes and forcing them to miss shots sometimes. All around, that’s more our style of game.”
However, Pittsburgh will be without young minute-eating defenseman Olli Maatta for about the next month; the native of Finland is having a potentially cancerous tumor removed. Rob Scuderi figures to see increased playing time in his stead.
Crosby is off to his usual hot start with 12 points in seven games. Over his career, Pittsburgh’s second son, Evgeni Malkin, has fluctuated between best-player-in-the-league type of years and so-so performances. (Though a so-so Malkin is still good for a point per game.) The enigmatic Malkin appears to be on his game early this season, though, with ten points in the Pens’ first seven games.
While the Pens are led by two superstars, New Jersey has more of a scoring-by-committee approach. The Devils have already gotten goals from 15 different players and only four of those players have more than a single tally.
The Penguins are listed at -172 to win and the Devils are +156. New Jersey and Pittsburgh have alternated wins in the last five meetings. But, for the trend-seekers, the home team has come out on top in all five.
(Photo credit: Elliot from Castro Valley, California, USA (Sidney Crosby) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Photo may appear cropped from its original.)
