Scary Good

Even on the best of days northern New Jersey is a flat, unattractive place. Power lines crisscross the skies, and a sea of concrete gives way to strip-mall shores. Last Friday was particularly dreary: heavy rain, a hard wind and roadways clogged with drivers who believed that honking their horns would move bumper-to-bumper traffic. To escape that gloom, all you had to do was duck into the New Jersey Devils' practice facility in West Orange, N.J. You would have found goalie Martin Brodeur clowning about with a pair of purple-tinted shades set jauntily on his brow, and you would have heard a lot of players saying things such as, "We feel like we're in pretty good shape."

"You look for the down faces," New Jersey coach Larry Robinson said that morning, "but everybody looks very upbeat." Why not? The Devils were only down two games to one to the NHL's best regular-season team, the Colorado Avalanche, in the Stanley Cup finals. No team plays better when it's behind in a series than New Jersey, which time and again rises from a messy bed only to look deeply refreshed. So despite slumbering through long stretches of inconsistent play in the first three games of the series, the Devils woke up on Tuesday morning with a three-games-to-two lead after a convincing 4-1 defeat of Colorado in Game 5. On Thursday. New Jersey would have a chance to retain the Stanley Cup at home.

The Devils play in the Meadowlands Sports Complex, which is exactly what afflicts New Jersey fans. During the second period of Game 4 against the Avalanche last Saturday, shortly after the Devils had rallied to tie the score 1-1 and were resurrecting their Cup hopes with an inspired stretch of offensive pressure, the crowd roared its approval by chanting, "Rangers suck!" Like their fans, the Devils thrive when they're reminded that there's a more popular team nearby.

After the much-beloved Mario Lemieux and the Pittsburgh Penguins upset New Jersey in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals last month, opening the door for cynics to doubt the Devils' superiority, New Jersey responded with its best three games of the playoffs to win the series going away. "When people write or talk bad about us, we say, 'Screw everybody,' and we play as a team," says center John Madden. "When people start saying how great we are, we drift and don't play well together. Just write bad about us, and we'll be set, O.K.?"

Sorry, John. These Devils are so good that when they play well, you wonder how they ever lose. New Jersey's series-tying 3-2 win over Colorado in Game 4 was every bit as lopsided as its 35-12 shots-on-goal advantage indicated. That game will be remembered for the Devils' unceasing control—the puck was in the Avalanche's end for nearly 10 minutes more than it was in New Jersey's—and for the plays and misplays of goaltender Patrick Roy. His snuffing of the Devils' relentless attack had Colorado clinging to a 2-1 lead in the third period. Then the goal that turned the fortunes in the game, and perhaps the series, came with 12 minutes to play, when Roy badly mishandled the puck behind the net as New Jersey left wing Jay Pandolfo bore down on him. Pandolfo shoveled the loose puck in front, and center Scott Gomez knocked it into the empty net. Nine minutes later right wing Petr Sykora scored the game-winner.

"Maybe that was a break," Devils defenseman Ken Daneyko said of Roy's miscue. "But those breaks are going to happen when you're on a team the way we were on these guys. We dominated from the start."

"It was only a matter of time before they scored," said Colorado defenseman Jon Klemm. "They kept coming and coming."

Yet how can a club capable of so thoroughly controlling the powerful Avalanche play the way New Jersey did in losing Games 1 and 3 by a combined score of 8-1? These are the same Devils who crushed the vastly inferior Carolina Hurricanes for the first three games in the opening round and then let the next two slip away before closing out the series. This is the team that played sloppily and often lazily in falling behind the Toronto Maple Leafs three games to two in the second round and then trounced them in Games 6 and 7. On their way to winning the Cup last season, the Devils were alarmingly lethargic in falling behind the Philadelphia Flyers three games to one in the Eastern Conference finals. After New Jersey lost 5-0 to Colorado in Game 1 of this year's Cup finals, Robinson was asked if he'd seen his team play a worse playoff game during his two seasons at the helm. "Oh, sure," he said. "We do that, you know."

When the Devils go awry, it's because they rely too heavily on their considerable individual talents—seven players scored more than 20 goals in the regular season—and not enough on the seamless, smash-mouth hockey that gives them the look of a classic four-lines-deep champion. Put New Jersey out in a game it can afford to lose, and it drifts out of position on defense, makes thoughtless passes and sleepskates until some misfortune jolts it to life. When the Devils are on, they are the highest-paid group of blue-collar workers in New Jersey, worthy of the hard hats on their heads. "Maybe this team likes to feel danger," says nine-year veteran center Bob Corkum. "The bad news is that we get ourselves into these situations. The good news is that we respond well to them."

That the Devils had done much of their best work against Colorado while short-handed was wholly consistent with their M.O. Corkum's goal in Game 2—New Jersey's first score of the series—developed as a shorthanded rush and went in just after the penalty expired. With the Devils a man down early in Game 4, wing Patrik Elias's neat wrister heal Roy for New Jersey's first goal.