The young New Jersey Devils are rising, surprising even some of the NHL’s top teams.
Nathan Bastian netted a power-play goal with 6:56 left. Yegor Sharangovich sealed the victory with a short-handed, empty-net goal as the Devils rallied from a three-goal deficit to defeat the Colorado Avalanche 5-3 on Tuesday night.
“I think when you look at it, we’ve played a lot of games like this where you get down and we battle back, but we don’t quite make it all the way back or win the game,” Devils coach Lindy Ruff said. “I thought tonight there was just a belief that we would return.”
Tomas Tatar, Ty Smith, and Damon Severson also scored for the Devils. Nico Daws made 23 saves for New Jersey, which recorded its biggest comeback win of the season.
“It was a great win, obviously,” said Tatar, who achieved his 400th career point. We are trying to create here a winning mentality, and these kinds of games give it to you. You have to respect their team; they have a lot of experience and have been around for a long time. In the third, they were going to battle back, but we kept skating and played our game, and I think we deserve to win.”
Jesper Bratt contributed three assists for the Devils, and Jack Hughes added two, which helped with the game-winning goal.
Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, and Cale Makar scored for the Avalanche, who were 23-0 this season when leading after the first period. Darcy Kuemper made 38 saves.
“We were terrible. So it is what it is,” said coach Jared Bednar, whose team leads the NHL with 87 points. “The team needs to get a rest and to move on. We were second to every puck. They were skating, and we weren’t checking. We looked tired, mentally tired. We turned the puck over every second time we touched it.”
MacKinnon and Rantanen scored power-play goals in the first period.
“Overall, it was a really tough game,” Rantanen said. “I don’t think we had any momentum in the 60 minutes. The power play was the one that got us momentum. Other than that, we were awful tonight.”
Playing their second game in as many nights, the Avalanche seemed to run out of steam after taking a 3-0 lead early in the second period on Makar’s 21st goal of the season, which extended his point-scoring streak to 13 games.
By the end of the second period, the game was tied at 3, with Tatar starting the comeback at 9:20 by putting the rebound of a Jonas Siegenthaler shot off the post into an empty net.
Smith narrowed the gap with a shot that might have been deflected by Colorado defenseman Samuel Girard. Severson tied the game with a power-play goal at 17:21.
Bastian secured the game-winner after Hughes’s power-play shot hit him in the crease. The puck stopped about a foot from the goal line, and he swatted it home for his 10th of the season.
The loss was Colorado’s fourth since Jan. 14 (19-4-2).
Game Notes
The win was Ruff’s 776th of his NHL career, moving him ahead of Paul Maurice into sole possession of sixth in league history. Devils captain Nico Hischier sat out with a lower-body injury. The game was the first between the teams since Jan. 4, 2020. Daws started his fifth straight game for New Jersey. Colorado is now 11-4-1 in back-to-back games this season. This was their first loss in regulation in the second game (6-1-1).
UP NEXT
- Avalanche: Finish a three-game road trip at Carolina on Thursday night.
- Devils: Host Winnipeg on Thursday night in the third game of a four-game homestand.
