If anyone is curious what a team suffering from being snake-bit actually looks like, Exhibit A was on display last night at the Prudential Center.
That’s where the Devils, reeling from injuries and continuing to watch luck transform into a curse word, got wiped out by the Senators, 2-0, in front of a grumbling crowd of 16,099.
“You don’t want to want blame anything on bad luck,” said Patrik Elias, who had a five of the team’s 33 shots compared to the Senators’ 11. “We were creating chances, trying to create our own luck, but it’s just not happening.”
The Devils (15-16-10) have now gone 0-5-4 in the nine games since star winger Ilya Kovalchuk went down with a right shoulder injury. In that time they have fallen from seventh in the conference to 10th, now four points out of a playoff position with seven games remaining.
“The more games we lose, the slimmer chance to make the playoffs,” said goalie Martin Brodeur, who added last night’s “was one of the most boring games I’ve played in a long time.
“When you go out there and you execute what you’re supposed to do, it’s just a tough way to play hockey.”
The Devils not only outshot the Senators, but also directed 58 shots at net compared to Ottawa’s 25. Yet it was the 21-14-6 Senators who capitalized on their chances, and held off the idle Islanders for the sixth position in the conference.
“The effort has been like that for most of the season,” Devils coach Pete DeBoer said. “If there’s blame to go around, it has to go to the coaches. We have to give these guys some tools to win some games.”
Most specifically, that means on the power play, where the Devils went 0-for-4 in 6:36 — including 1:24 of 5-on-3 — and are now 1-for-23 in their past six games. That gift-wrapped two-man advantage came in the first, when the Senators looked like a team that flew in from Philadelphia after a 3-1 win over the Flyers on Thursday night.
Yet the Devils couldn’t find a way to get one in, and by the time the second period ended, 20-year-old rookie Jean-Gabriel Pageau had scored his first NHL goal in his second career game, followed by Milan Michalek scoring a goal in his first game back after missing 24 straight with knee problems.
“They’re giving us what we’re asking of them and they’re not getting rewarded,” said DeBoer, who was also without two top defensemen, captain Bryce Salvador (wrist) and Anton Volchenkov (suspension). “We’ve got to find creative ways here to go at this a different way.”
bcyrgalis@nypost.com