The New Jersey Devils have been off to a hot start, as they are first in the league with a 4-1-0 record, and a large part of their success is due to their goaltending. After last season saw their goalies sink their playoff chances, this year both Jacob Markstrom and Jake Allen have provided a stable presence in the crease to give the Devils a chance to win every night.
Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk talked about the Devils goaltending and how important it’s been to their start on Daily Faceoff Live.
Frank Seravalli: Whether it’s Markstrom or Allen, I think that the Devils has a legitimate chance to win every night, all 82 games in the NHL, which is certainly not what you could have said about New Jersey’s goaltending prior.
And what I also really like is that there’s still experiencing a couple injuries on their back end. So we still haven’t seen this team at full strength. It’s probably gonna lead to some significant questions and in a good way. What happens with someone like Seamus Casey who I love what we’ve seen for him so far, but will he end up being the odd man out going to the AHL because of some guys getting healthy on the back end?
So there’s lots of reasons to be excited about the New Jersey Devils. I think this team solved and fixed a lot of issues that they had in the offseason. It’s not easy to do that in one offseason and it certainly wasn’t as flashy as what Nashville did or what some of these other teams did but I think lowkey, New Jersey put themselves in a better position for success than just about any other team in the offseason.
Tyler Yaremchuk: And another thing too if you want to be even more optimistic about them is they’re off to this really strong start and their stars haven’t really been their stars. Their leading scorer is Stefan Noesen. Paul Cotter, who they picked up from Vegas, is second on the team in points. Casey, as you mentioned, three goals on the year. Like, Jack Hughes hasn’t scored yet.
Frank Seravalli: Yeah, and in a perfect world, Casey, if everyone’s healthy, he was probably starting the year in the AHL. So like, just goes to show you like, now what?
Tyler Yaremchuk: Yeah. Again, I think there are tons of reasons to be optimistic about this Devils team moving forward from the crease on out and that was certainly not the case that year ago.
You can watch the full episode here…
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