Devils 5
Panthers 1
SUNRISE, Fla. – The Devils hadn’t gone longer between victories since before they were true contenders. This time, there was no room for hurt feelings when Larry Robinson broke up the A Line.
This time, Robinson made a thorough job of it, and so did his players. The result was the Devils’ first victory in eight games, a 5-1 triumph over the Panthers here last night.
“You do it and it works and you look like a genius. You do it and it doesn’t, you look like . . . ” said Robinson, criticized for a partial and less-successful A Line breakup a week earlier.
“These are drastic times,” Robinson said. “I’m a pretty patient person, but the games keep mounting up and mounting up. Sooner or later, we had to do something.”
Finally, his offense did something. On the brink of their first eight-game winless streak since 1992, the Devils ended major droughts. Petr Sykora scored for the first time in 13, Jason Arnott for the second time in 13 and John Madden for the second time in 12.
Without benefit of a morning practice for acclimatization, Robinson scattered his A Line to three different trios. While Patrik Elias, Arnott and Sykora had scored 20 goals in the team’s 11 home games, they had managed only four in nine on the road.
“We had [an A Line] line meeting before warmups, then we saw the new lines on the board,” Elias said. “It helped the team. I liked it.
“Why change something that works? I think it should stay the way it is. It gives the team better balance.”
Elias joined Bobby Holik and Andreas Salomonsson, Arnott centered for Scott Gomez and Randy McKay, and Sykora played with Sergei Nemchinov and Sergei Brylin, who was back from a knee injury. They were reunited last night for power-play duty, where Arnott scored his game-winner.
“It was a relief to finally score a road power-play goal,” Elias said, of the team’s second away PPG this season which also ended an overall 15-chance goose-egg.
Bill Lindsay had the Devils sweating early when he scored a goal that Martin Brodeur should have stopped. Sykora answered with his fifth at 18:13 of the first, rebounding Scott Niedermayer’s right point shot for his first of November.
Arnott put the Devils in front at 4:09 of the third, snapping New Jersey’s 0-for-15 power-play drought. Holik, leading the league in faceoff percentage, beat No. 3 man Kevyn Adams on a right-circle draw and Arnott was in the trigger spot, rifling his eighth over Roberto Luongo’s waffle, long side.
That goal marked only the third time in eight games that the Devils scored more than once, and Madden added insurance with a breakaway at 10:44, his fourth. Holik scored his ninth and Jim McKenzie his first in the final 3:09.
*
The crowd went down memory lane in booing Niedermayer when he high-sticked Peter Worrell late in the scoreless second. Niedermayer took a 10-game suspension for high-sticking Worrell March 19, 2000 . . . After review, NHL agreed that Colin White’s butt-end on Tampa’s Jassen Cullimore did not merit suspension, regarding Cullimore’s death-act as hogwash. White was correctly ejected with a major for that act . . . Panthers were without both Pavel (concussion) and Valeri (knee surgery) Bure . . . Brylin returned to the lineup after missing five games with a knee injury . . . Mark Faucette, one of the refs ripped by Larry Robinson after Friday’s 2-0 loss in Tampa, called last night’s game.
