Faceoff still haunts Devils' Madden

WEST ORANGE, N.J. -- New Jersey Devils winger John Madden sat down at his locker after what may have been the season's last practice Friday and talked about the faceoff that may never stop playing in his head.

It was Madden's center-ice faceoff with the Carolina Hurricanes' Rod Brind'Amour with 20.7 seconds left in regulation in Game 2 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series.

The outcome of that play began a sequence which cost the Devils a series-tying win and bled away their confidence.

The Devils head into Game 4 down 3-0, struggling to recover from surrendering the tying goal in Game 2 with three seconds to go.

"Three seconds. It sits in my mind, three seconds," said Madden, one of the NHL's best defensive forwards. "If we could have held out, we could have been tied coming into our building and it could have been anybody's ball game."

There are many reasons the Devils didn't hold out. New Jersey goalie Martin Brodeur let a desperate shot by Carolina's Eric Staal get by. Devils defensemen didn't knock Staal down or hold his stick -- knowing a penalty couldn't hurt them.

But Madden believes the Devils lost because he won the faceoff.

Madden wanted to pull the puck backward to his defenseman Brad Lukowich. He did get the puck on his stick, but it was on end. When he pulled back it popped into the air, going over Lukowich's head landing in one corner of the Devils zone.

Brodeur in the past may have gone to the corner and cleared the puck, but a rule introduced this year bars goalies from handling pucks anywhere outside the crease, except in the trapezoid behind the net.

The Canes got to the puck, got it to Staal and got to the Devils.

"There's a thousand different things I could have done differently when I was on the ice for the last 20 seconds that could have changed the outcome not only of the game, but maybe the series," Madden said.

And there's one thing he wishes he didn't do. That was pulling the puck back into the Devils' zone.

"I think that was my first mistake," he said. "I should have shot it forward and made them ... go get it and then come our way and try to get it into the zone.

"I just basically dumped it into the corner for them where they exactly wanted it."

Madden was asked whether Brind'Amour lost the faceoff on purpose, hoping for that.

"I can't see someone thinking to himself, 'Yeah, he's going to win it so clean it's going to go over Lukowich's head and into the corner.'

"If he's that intelligent and that great, well, then God bless him."

Brind'Amour said Friday that he didn't try to lose the faceoff.

"I wasn't trying to do anything special. At that point I think we were all in shock that they had scored," he said.

The faceoff was just a funny bounce, he said.

"Just the way our sticks hit somehow it shot up in the air," he said. "You're going to win them clean, but you're not going to win it and have [the puck] go over a defenseman's head."

Told of Madden's surprise at the puck's flight, Brind'Amour said, "I've never seen that either, actually. It was kind of a freak thing, but it kind of worked out for us."

Madden, the winner of two Stanley Cups with the Devils, knows how it happened, but it doesn't seem right.

"We lost the game because I won it [the faceoff]," he said.

"I did what I wanted to do. I wanted to win it back that way."

Madden tried to put aside the bad bounce.

"You can't sit here and dwell on it," he said -- after sitting and dwelling on it. "You've got to look forward. What's done is done. Find a way to win one game and go from there. Anything could happen. It's playoff hockey."

After Game 2, Madden knows anything can happen. But he's still not sure how winning a faceoff is the worst outcome, how a puck becomes a frisbee and a lead with three seconds to go becomes a loss.

When told that Madden was having trouble getting the faceoff out of his mind, Brind'Amour grinned like a man who might have won it after all.

"That's OK. We don't mind that," he said.