There are some games that, no matter when they appear during the season, you circle them on your calendar. One such game is when Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers come to town.

Wouldn’t you know it? Tuesday night was exactly that night. The New Jersey Devils hosted McDavid and his high-flying Oilers in a matchup between two teams that each entered the game having won seven of their last 10 contests, albeit in different ways. On Tuesday, the result was a 4-3 Devils shootout victory. The victory was fueled by a two-goal performance from Jack Hughes and a rejuvenated power-play led by Connor Brown.

In net, making his Devils home debut, was Connor Hellebuyck, who stopped 18 of the 21 shots he faced through overtime. Opposite Hellebuyck was Tristan Jarry, who made 31 saves on the 34 shots he faced through 65 minutes.

The performance put forth by both teams was a rather telling example – both positive and negative – of how each plays and how they’ve gotten to where they are. 

On the one hand, you have the Oilers, who came into the game tied with the Colorado Avalanche for the most goals scored in The League. They also came in as road warriors, The NHL’s last remaining unbeaten team away from the comforts of home. (They were 7-0-0 and are now 7-0-1).

But let’s be honest. The biggest reason the Oilers are doing this is Connor McDavid. He came in with 39 points in 15 games, an NHL-record 15-game season-opening assist streak, on pace for approximately 218 points and within striking distance of breaking Wayne Gretzky’s record for the fewest games to 50 points to start a season. 

Before the game, Hellebuyck told NHL.com’s Mike Morreale, “His speed will push defenders back and really make you make tough decisions. But his balance, being able to go both directions, that’s what makes it hard to read because he’s not really committing to one or the other.”

McDavid has been the best player in The League for over a decade, but he’s taken his game to a completely different level so far this year. According to a team source who spoke on the condition of anonymity, there are two main factors in what McDavid has done so far this year. 

The first is him playing on a line consistently with Leon Draisaitl. As the source pointed out, in their careers, McDavid and Draisaitl have never played on a line together for 15 straight games.

The second factor is the team’s added motivation to make new Head Coach Mike Babcock look good in his controversial return to The NHL. According to the source, while the players had a say in adding Babcock as coach, there is a strong desire around the team to make him look good and quiet the outside noise around him. 

“It’s not fun,” Devils veteran defenseman Brett Pesce told the team’s digital reporter Amanda Stein before the game about trying to slow down McDavid. “He’s just obviously one of the best, if not the best, to ever play the game, so it’s tough. He creates things out of nothing and he’s kind of just in his own league. It’s like he’s too good for the NHL, which is crazy to say, but it’s true. So, just like I said, though, just trying to minimize giving him freebies, I think, is really the only thing you can do.”

The Devils certainly minimized McDavid on Tuesday night, limiting him to just a single shot on goal and a lone secondary assist.

In fact, if there’s one thing these Devils have been doing well of late, it’s minimizing the opponents’ freebies on a nightly basis. Outside of New Jersey’s two games against the Colorado Avalanche, they haven’t allowed more than 21 shots on goal since losing to the Washington Capitals on Saturday, October 17th, a stretch of just over two weeks.

It was right around that time when the Devils made some subtle changes to their defensive structure and the results have been largely positive. As simple as it may sound, the biggest change, according to Pesce, has been that all the players have bought in and are playing as a cohesive unit whenever they’re on the ice. By doing so, they are able to keep their structure and make sound decisions with the puck. 

To go along with that, the Devils are limiting the opposition’s goal-scoring, allowing the fourth-fewest goals in the Eastern Conference and the fifth-fewest in the entire NHL. 

As Babcock told Morreale before the game, “They (the Devils) can go. They can get up and down the rink and play entertaining hockey.” It’s like the old saying: “The best defense is a good offense.”

When the game started, New Jersey’s offense wasn’t quite ready, which allowed Edmonton to dictate the pace of play. With 8:29 gone by in the opening period, Mattias Ekholm found Evan Bouchard with a cross-ice pass up high that the latter whizzed past Hellebuyck from the top of the left face-off circle to give the Oilers a 1-0 lead. 

It was shortly after Bouchard’s goal that the Devils started to find their game and while they were unsuccessful on their first-period power-play, their second-period opportunity proved to be the equalizer. 

At 7:34 of the middle period, Connor Murphy was called for holding Nico Hischier. Devils Head Coach Sheldon Keefe put his new top power-play unit on the ice, which featured Connor Brown in place of Luke Evangelista. 

After Monday’s practice, Keefe explained the move to the media by saying, “He brings familiarity. That group had a lot of success and we liked it a lot at the end of the season last season.”

Brown made Keefe look prophetic almost immediately. Luke Hughes sent a short pass to brother Jack Hughes at the top of the Oilers’ zone. The elder Hughes brother sent a shot toward Jarry that Edmonton’s netminder stopped, but the rebound sat there waiting to be batted home. Brown did just that, eight seconds after the power-play began, to tie the game 1-1.

Just over seven minutes later, Dougie Hamilton found Jack Hughes in the lower right face-off circle and Hughes wired the puck past Jarry to give the Devils a 2-1 lead. 

Then, 10 seconds after Hughes’ goal, Jake Walman was called for elbowing Cody Glass to send the Devils to their second power-play of the period and third of the game. This time, it took the Devils 35 seconds to cash in. A pass from Nico Hischier at the top of the right face-off circle went to Brown directly in front of Jarry. Brown passed the puck into the crease, straight to a streaking Jack Hughes, who tipped the puck into the goal and crashed into the crossbar to score his second straight goal and give the Devils a 3-1 lead. 

“I think that the pace, the attack mentality, I think we attacked right off the face-offs,” Jesper Bratt said. “And then, with Brownie (Connor Brown) and us other guys too, we won some pucks. We stayed in the zone for longer stretches. We created some good attack chances by just kind of exposing their pressure a little bit.”

At that point in the second period, New Jersey was outshooting Edmonton 14-1, showing once again that the best defense is a good offense. They simply did not allow the Oilers to control the puck. 

“I think it kind of comes back to that patience and the way that they play,” Brown said after the game about how the Devils turned things around in the second period. “They don’t force anything at the blue line; they don’t really mess around in the neutral zone at all. I’ve played for Babs (Mike Babcock) before and I understand that with his clubs, they’re gonna beat you based on getting frustrated and based on trying to make something out of nothing. 

“I thought we did a really good job in the second period. We really weren’t trying to make something out of nothing. We were putting it behind them and we were kind of letting our legs and our pace and our depth kind of roll and that was able to tilt the rink and we were able to get some pucks on the power-play.”

As with anything, though, if you take your eye off the puck, the tide of the game will turn on a dime. 

Anthony Mantha was called for slashing Mathieu Joseph at 18:01 of the second period. Fifteen seconds later, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins snapped off a shot from the left face-off circle that beat Hellebuyck through traffic to cut New Jersey’s lead to 3-2. 

Arseny Gritsyuk was then called for a tripping penalty with 1:03 left in the second period. To compound the problem, Hischier sent the puck over the glass with 11 seconds left in the period. That meant the Devils started the third period at a three-on-five disadvantage for the first 57 seconds of the third. 

Leon Draisaitl sniped the puck past Hellebuyck, over his glove-side shoulder, just three seconds after Gritsyuk left the box, to tie the game 3-3.

The third period opened up from there, with McDavid and the Oilers exchanging rush chances up and down the ice. 

“I thought we played a better game, top to bottom,” Hellebuyck said. “Start to finish, I just felt that we weathered the storm pretty well and the goals that they got, I just felt were lucky. I know you earn your own luck and they probably earned it in some way, but I liked our game. If we continue playing that way, we’re gonna have a lot of success.”

Eventually, since neither team scored again, the game went to overtime. And when neither side scored in overtime, the game went to a shootout. Jack Hughes and Evan Rodrigues (the first and third shooters) couldn’t solve Jarry, but Jesper Bratt (the second shooter) did. 

On the other side, McDavid used a filthy move to beat Hellebuyck, but Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins were turned aside. So, the shootout went to its fourth round and that’s when Gritsyuk picked his spot and sniped the puck past Jarry to give the Devils the lead. Hellebuyck closed things out by turning aside Kasperi Kapanen’s shot.

“Rodrigues is right up there; he’s one of our top guys, especially if you just factor in recent years,” Keefe explained about his decision to have Rodrigues shoot third. “Roddy’s been pretty fresh and he also looked good in the practices and training camp and all that kind of stuff. So we had him as one of the three. 

“And then Grits (Arseny Gritsyuk), small sample, only taken one (shootout) shot in The NHL, but done well in the KHL previously and obviously he’s the hot hand. Considered him going third. We just kind of wanted to stick with what we had sort of planned out in terms of Roddy being our third shooter. And that’s the way that it worked out here today.”

The win showed off New Jersey’s resilience, adaptability and the team’s trust in each other. It also meant that, with another victory over another top team, the Devils had passed another test in a season full of them.