The Devils put 30 shots on Linus Ullmark on Monday and have one goal to show for it. That's a coaching problem, and it belongs to Sheldon Keefe.
New Jersey spent the offseason adding forward talent, bringing in names like Evangelista, Mantha and Rodrigues to fix exactly this issue: a team that couldn't finish. Five games into the season, the finishing problem hasn't gone away. It's gotten worse in the moments that matter. Against Ottawa, the Devils outshot a divisional-caliber opponent by ten and still lost by three, because Arseny Gritsyuk's goal with five minutes left was the only puck New Jersey could put past a goaltender who stopped 29 of 30.
The easy scapegoat is officiating. New Jersey took five penalties to Ottawa's two, including a five-minute major to Mantha, and spent long stretches of the night killing instead of attacking. Fans grumbling about a slashing call on one of those trips to the box are missing the actual problem. A team with this much forward skill shouldn't need a referee's mercy to generate offense at five-on-five. Blaming the stripes is a way of not blaming the bench, and the bench is where this starts.
This group can score. Two nights before the Ottawa game, the Devils beat Vancouver 4-1, with Nico Hischier scoring twice and Jack Hughes setting up two more on the power play. That game proved the talent is real. It also proved the scoring is almost entirely power-play dependent, and the moment a disciplined team like Ottawa cuts down the penalty minutes available to feed on, New Jersey's forwards go quiet. A coach's job is to build five-on-five offense that doesn't evaporate when the man advantage isn't there. Keefe hasn't done it. He hasn't done it against the Islanders earlier this season, when his own team got shut out and he admitted afterward that "they played at another level today that we haven't seen... I guess you'd say we failed that stress test." He hasn't done it against Ottawa either, when a ten-shot edge turned into a three-goal loss.
The Hockey News flagged this exact tension before the season even started: a Devils team with the forward depth to compete, resting entirely on whether Keefe could put the pieces together. Five games in, he hasn't. The lineup tinkering, the special-teams reliance, the undisciplined penalty minutes that hand the other team its offense: that's coaching. The roster isn't short on talent. The Devils have the skill to score at five-on-five. They lost to Ottawa because their head coach still hasn't figured out how to get that skill to show up without a power play attached to it.
This is a pattern. It was visible last spring, when New Jersey finished near the bottom of the league in goals scored. It showed up again when Keefe called out his own team for failing a stress test, and again Monday, when 30 shots turned into one goal. The excuses have run out. If Keefe can't get five-on-five offense out of this much talent, the Devils need to stop waiting for him to figure it out and start looking for someone who already has.
