The New Jersey Devils finally put together the kind of night they’ve been searching for, rolling past the Vancouver Canucks 4-1 on Saturday and showing signs that this group can win in a way that looks very different from the early part of the season.
It didn’t start smoothly. Vancouver struck first, and for a moment it looked like the same old script was about to play out with the Devils giving up the opening goal again.
But that feeling didn’t last long. Nico Hischier answered with his first goal of the season on the power play, a marker that also stood as the 200th goal of his career.
That sequence was the best the Devils power play has looked all season.
A few minutes later, Jesper Boqvist buried his second goal in as many games, and that goal also gave Amadeus Lombardi the first point of his career. From there, New Jersey kept pushing. The Devils controlled the game, eventually finishing with close to 40 shots and four goals.
Hischier added his second goal of the afternoon, and Jesper Bratt finished things off with a hard-angled goal. Bratt’s goal was technically the first of the pair, but the bigger picture was the same: the Devils kept layering pressure and never let the Canucks back into it.
What made this win stand out is that it was the first time this season the Devils actually played with a lead. Their only previous victory came on a Jack Hughes overtime goal, so this was the first real look at how they operate when they’re ahead. For a team that too often last season found ways to turn bad stretches into something worse, that matters.
Last year, the Devils were the kind of team that could spiral. They’d hit a rough patch, need a win badly, and still find a way to lose.
That’s how a team that was one of the league’s best in October ended up out of the playoff picture by April. Saturday felt like the opposite of that.
The Devils came into the game after three days off following a 5-3 loss to the Utah Mammoth, a game that also featured a frustrating “ intent to blow the whistle ” call that wiped out a Timo Meier goal late in the third period. That loss never felt right. New Jersey was chasing the game the whole way and couldn’t gain traction against a Mammoth team that has started to make noise.
Saturday looked nothing like that. The Devils were in control, the power play finally clicked, the penalty kill recovered after a bad move by Evan Rodrigues, and the goals kept coming at the right times.
They also did it without Jack Hughes having to carry everything. Hughes was excellent, finishing with two assists and playing his best game of the season, but he didn’t have to be the engine for everything. Hischier took on more of that load, and the fourth line helped create offense across the depth chart.
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