There is a part of me that wanted to just write “Sergei Bobrovsky is very good at hockey right now, and the New Jersey Devils are currently not.”
When you get down to it, though, that’s what this game really comes down to.
The Devils were nice enough to have Dalton Prout start the game against his former teammates, and former Devil Kyle Quincey, the other side of that trade equation also got some solid ice time, particularly on the early PK.
Quincey would be forced to take a hooking penalty to keep Kyle Palmieri from scoring, but that was one of a very small handful of real scoring threats for the Devils, who struggled to put together 20 shots through the contest, while the Blue Jackets started smelling blood fairly early after successfully killing both penalties, though they did not find an answer for Corey Schneider.