Stanley Cup Finals 2012: Can Jordan Nolan Build on His Game 1 Performance?

The New Jersey Devils turned heads last week when their fourth line perked up to help put away the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference finals. In light of that, top-to-bottom contributions will be equally critical in the Los Angeles Kings’ effort to vanquish New Jersey in the Stanley Cup championship round.

Kings head coach Darryl Sutter seems to be ahead in that game. After all, in Wednesday night’s series opener at the Prudential Center, he doled out the most ice time his fourth line has seen on a single night so far in these playoffs.

For the first time this spring, rookie Jordan Nolan and linemates Colin Fraser and Brad Richardson each saw 11-plus minutes of action. Only once in the previous three rounds had each of the fourth-liners’ ice time broken into double-digit minutes.

The nominal bottom-feeders on the L.A. depth chart set the right tone during a shift near the halfway mark of Wednesday’s first period. In a span of five seconds, Nolan sandwiched a hit on Devils defenseman Andy Greene with a pair of takeaways.

The second of those takeaways was used to set up Fraser from behind the net for the evening and series icebreaker, giving the Kings a 1-0 edge at the 9:56 mark. As the defensive duel continued for the better part of the night, Fraser’s strike held the visitors up through regulation before top gun Anze Kopitar polished off a 2-1 victory in overtime.

As it happened, Nolan’s takeaways constituted half of only four credited to a Los Angeles player on Wednesday. In addition, he tied Kopitar and fellow rookie Slava Voynov for third on the team with four hits on the night, trailing only Matt Greene and Jarret Stoll (five apiece).

This is coming a little less than four months after Nolan made his NHL debut in a Feb. 11 visit to the New York Islanders. He is barely three months removed from being permanently promoted from the AHL’s Manchester Monarchs, along with Dwight King, on Feb. 27.

The 11 minutes and 26 seconds of ice time in Game 1 was the most action Nolan had seen in any NHL contest since his first four outings with the Kings.

Out of 67 regular-season games, Fraser was only kept busier on 12 nights than he was Wednesday. With his assist on Drew Doughty’s 2-2 equalizer in Game 5 of the Western Conference final, Fraser officially had his first point-scoring streak―albeit one with an eight-day gap between games―since April 9-11, 2010.

Nolan’s setup on Fraser’s strike gave the freshman his first scoring collaboration with either of his linemates since a 5-4 victory March 6 over the Nashville Predators. But the timing and nature of their latest collaboration could bode particularly well for Los Angeles in its endeavor to win three of the next six games and deliver the franchise’s first Cup.

On a team whose active forward units are stocked with six-footers and include seven players tipping the scale at 200-plus pounds, Nolan’s size is rivaled only by King, Kopitar and Dustin Penner. In order to ensure the Kings’ best use of their depth, he must utilize his size to create space and, in turn, create scoring chances for himself and his fellow fourth-liners.

That was exactly what he did on Wednesday in the act of separating the Devils from the puck and ultimately getting the lone assist on a hard-to-come-by goal.