Devils 3, Flyers 1

I really should be doing homework.

Anyway, the Devils won. At home. That's good because it hadn't happened for a while. But they beat the worst team in the league and that is that.

It was a true score of 2-1, that's when I mean when I talk about the game being 3-1 but the last goal was by the team that was winning after they threw the puck in the empty net. So yes, the game was 2-1.

It started off bad enough for the Devils. Lack of discipline leading to penalties, not skating well, missing pucks all over the place, missing passes to each other, looking sluggish on offense and failing to get into position on defense. They played a pretty bad first period and didn't play much better for most of the second, but it was about even in the middle of the period and then the Devils took over late in the second, scoring both of their goals in the final 2 minutes of the period. First was Mike Rupp with a nice goal, then it was Zajac on the power play shoving one at the goal with hardly any time remaining and it went in. Brodeur had the shutout going until late in the game when Simon Gagne, of course, slammed one in there. The Devils hung on for the win.

Despite the poor play of the Devils, Broduer only saw 15 shots. That's pretty dang impressive. They went from 8 shots on goal in the first period to only 7 the rest of the game, with a measly 2 shots in the final period. One of which went in, as I recall.

Anyway, good win for the Devils to reassert themselves over a far inferior team. The team got a boost with John Madden's return, but also lost Gomez early in the game and for the rest of the game. So they could have been downhearted about that, but they didn't let it show. I don't know the status of Gomez, but hopefully it's not a big deal.

Interesting note: the Devils dominated the faceoffs, 32 to 15. That might be their best positive differential of the year, since they are usually not a good faceoff time. Not sure what it meant, probably that the Flyers aren't great.