PRE-GAME STORY
The Devils held an optional morning skate at Minnesota’s Xcel Energy Center. The heavily attended skate featured forwards Jack Hughes, Michael McLoed, Jesper Bratt, Dawson Mercer, Erik Haula, Curtis Lazar, Alexander Holtz, Chris Tierney and Nate Bastian, defensemen Luke Hughes and Collin Foote and goaltenders Vitek Vanecek and Akria Schmid.
Vanecek worked the starter’s end.
Home-and-Home
The Devils and Wild face off in the second half of back-to-back games. It is rare for a home-and-home series to be played against an opposite conference team, but the Devils enjoy the circumstance.
“You get to watch video and make some adjustments and anticipate some adjustments by them,” head coach Lindy Ruff said. “It’s not often you play an opponent back-to-back, especially one from the West.”
The Devils won, 4-3, in the previous affair Sunday at New Jersey’s Prudential Center.
“You love it. They’re those games within the games,” Lazar said. “They’re a good hockey club. We fought them off last game and now we have a chance coming into their barn and take another one. You know they’re going to respond.
“Now you have the prescout on them. It’s a game of adjustments. Kind of like a mini-playoff series.”
McLegend
There was no update on captain Nico Hischier, who will miss his second consecutive game with an upper-body injury. McLeod filled his role in the previous game between Ondrej Palat and Bratt.
“They’re obviuosly two highly skilled players that can score goals,” McLeod said. “I just play my game and try to win pucks back to them and try to get to the net.”
McLeod was one of the team’s most effective players down the stretch of last season and arguably their clutchest playoff performer. He scored the biggest goal of the year with a shorthanded series-winning Game 7 goal against the New York Rangers in the opening round of the playoffs.
“His game is always 100 miles per hour. He plays hard in all three zones,” Ruff said. “His speed is something he can utilize playing with those guys. I think he built off the way he finished the season last year and finished the playoffs.”
PK All Day
The Devils have the NHL’s No. 1-ranked power play with a 42.4-percent success rate. But they would like to improve upon their penalty kill, which is at 75 percent and tied for 22nd in the league.
“It’s starting to come along. It’ll take a couple more good games from it,” McLeod said. “We’re getting more comfortable with it and more trust in it.”
The Devils are playing without forwards Tomas Nosek and Hischier, both integral PKers. They also have new defensemen on the unit with the departures of Ryan Graves and Damon Severson from last season. So, it’s been a work in progress.
“We’re getting victimized. We’ve had some good games where we were gaining traction,” Ruff said. “We had a couple where we don’t get the clear and spend a lot of time in our zone. We’re looking to improve.
“The fact that we’re using different personnel, we’ve got a couple different defensemen this year, we’re still trying to build our kill and get it to where we need it to be.”
