A day after the Devils put Cory Murphy on waivers, coach Jacques Lemaire said the defenseman hadn’t been thrown off his game by the pressure of competing with Andy Greene. Lemaire said Murphy just flat-out got outplayed.
“Murphy started very well, [then] he dropped a bit. And then Greene came in and really played well. He played well, better than Murphy,” Lemaire said. “Sometimes the guys don’t realize how important it is to play well. Or maybe they do and they just can’t. I don’t know. But you know the importance there.”
Surely Murphy knows it all too well now. He cleared waivers yesterday and was assigned to Lowell of the AHL, which also signed wing Dean McAmmond. Murphy can be recalled without clearing re-entry waivers, but for now the job is Greene’s.
“I’m just trying to keep doing the same things I’ve been doing and let everything else take care of itself,” said Greene, who has a plus-1 rating and with whom the Devils are 4-0. They’re 0-3 with Murphy, who was a minus-2.
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Lemaire juggled his power-play units, dropping Travis Zajac from the first power play unit to the second and bumping center Dainius Zubrus up to the first.
“Otherwise we had all the top players on one unit,” Lemaire said. “If when I put them together we score, then it’s different. But if we’re not going to score, you might as well balance them.”
Defenseman Bryce Salvador — who rested Monday after taking a shot off his foot Saturday — was back at practice, calling it “nothing serious.”