Toronto Maple Leafs fans can sympathize with the frustrating New Jersey Devils faithful are going through on Thursday morning. The Devils dropped a frustrating 3-0 decision at the hands of the Dallas Stars on Wednesday night at the Prudential Center.
It’s not that the Devils played a bad game. They played well enough, even without their biggest star, Jack Hughes. It’s that the Stars, playing on back-to-back days, coming off a 3-2 overtime loss to the New York Rangers on Tuesday night, shut out the Devils.
The TV broadcast cut to images of former Maple Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe’s expression throughout the game.
There was good reason for it. Beyond the entertainment value of showing raw emotion in players and coaches, the Devils are learning a painful lesson Maple Leafs fans know very well. Sheldon Keefe’s system doesn’t hold up very well against tough defensive teams.
Don’t get me wrong. Sheldon Keefe is a great coach. And he’s the right person for the Devils. New Jersey has a high-octane, offense-driven lineup. The Devils this season resemble very much the Maple Leafs when Keefe took over roughly five years ago.
The Devils aren’t the grinding, neutral-zone trapping team of the late 90s and early 2000s. They don’t have Martin Brodeur picking up after them. They don’t have Scott Stevens terrorizing the neighborhood.
This Devils team is about speed, skill, and winning track meets with the best of them. But as the Maple Leafs learned, puck-possession systems tend to sputter against tight-checking teams. Think about that second-round series against the Florida Panthers in 2023. Florida bounced the Leafs in five games in that showdown.
Consistently, the Leafs struggled against clubs like the Panthers, Tampa Bay Lightning, and, you guessed it, the Boston Bruins. The Bruins, especially, were stifling under Jim Montgomery. The chatter surrounding the Leafs in 2024 was how the offense dried up. The physicality wasn’t there, and, well, it led to Keefe’s dismissal after dropping yet another Game 7.
Fast-forward to today, and the Devils have a fantastic team. They have the power to knock anyone’s lights out. But as soon as they meet a suffocating defensive structure like the Dallas Stars, the frustrations emerge.
The Devils will need to learn to win tight-checking games, much like the Maple Leafs have learned to do. The Leafs have struggled to transition from the laissez-faire approach espoused by Keefe to a more assiduous style preached by Craig Berube. Berube isn’t perfect, but his old-school style is a proven way to win championships. We’ve seen it in Detroit, Boston, St. Louis, Tampa, and Florida. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done.
I’m not advocating that the Maple Leafs will win the Cup under Berube. But running things back to the Shanaplan era would have been ludicrous. The Maple Leafs learned that high-flying, do-as-you-will hockey inevitably meets the immovable object that is playoff hockey.
That’s a lesson the Devils will need to learn sooner rather than later if they are to become a serious playoff contender.