Devils In-Depth - Rd 1 Gm 4 Recap

There’s a reason that hockey players always talk about playing “the full 60 minutes,” and it’s because of nights like this. For the first two periods of the game, Carolina flat out dominated the Devils. The Devils forwards put absolutely no pressure on Ward, the defense let the Hurricane forwards walk right through to Marty, who wasn’t exactly sharp himself. It’s not that he wasn’t stopping pucks, but he had no control over his rebounds, which burned him all three times.

But when Brian Gionta scored on a breakaway late in the second period, the Devils began an incredible comeback. Five minutes into the third, Brendan Shanahan buried a Gionta rebound to cut the deficit to one; then midway through the third, David Clarkson got hold of a rebound in front, and all alone, waited out Ward before cashing in to tie the game.

From that point forward, however, all the positive energy and momentum the Devils had built up came to a halt, even as the now scared Hurricanes cautiously tried to avoid giving up another scoring chance. Here was the Devils’ opportunity to put this team away and take a 3-1 series lead back home, but instead they threw away the momentum they had built with sloppy, lazy plays. And with less than 10 seconds left in the third period, it came back to haunt them. Lazy defense, the lack of desire to properly clear the puck, and Jay Pandolfo—too scared to be a man and block the shot—caused the Hurricanes to score a deflection goal with 0.2 seconds left on the clock. It was never an issue whether the puck crossed the line in time, the issue was the goaltender interference.

The NHL’s explanation:
The NHL’s goalie interference rule sets a mandate to protect the goalie in the blue ice – to let the goalie do his job. In the white ice, it is a more delicate matter, including who moved into whom. The referee has one split-second look at it and it is a judgment call. NHL Hockey Operations has no video review capacity in this instance. Hockey Operations officials agreed with the call on the ice, that it looked like the goalie, Martin Brodeur, moved out toward the skater.

Fine, it’s a judgment call, and it takes a split second. Watch the referee in that split second on the replay, he clearly is not even looking. Brodeur was out to play the angle on the shot, not to draw an interference call. Had a similar situation not have happened to the ref closest to the play a few weeks back, he may have had the guts to make the right call. Brodeur was likely angrier that the refs didn’t give him a break on this call, considering the far more obvious goalie interference call on Chad LaRose for Carolina’s third goal that the refs ignored.

But in the end, all of this is irrelevant. The refs made the call they did, Brodeur flipped out, the Devils were 0.2 seconds from overtime, but they go home losers instead. And as I said before, it’s their own fault. Maybe they pin the puck up against the boards instead of trying to clear it, maybe Pandolfo remembers that he’s a hockey player and takes one for the team, but none of those things happened, and the Devils head home back where they started from.


Bryce Salvador believes he might be able to play in Game 5, but after seeing how much pain he was in, I believe it’s a long shot at this point. There’s been no word just yet on whether or not Jamie Langenbrunner can return to the lineup, but it would be a huge boost if he could. Either way, one would hope the Devils can absorb what just happened to them, realize they only played hard for about 25 minutes last night, and come out on fire on Thursday.

Three Stars:
1st: Jussi Jokinen
2nd: Chad LaRose
3rd: Ryan Bayda

Series Tied, 2-2