How much of the New Jersey Devils’ five-game win streak belongs to Connor Hellebuyck, and how much of it gets on the plane to Winnipeg without him? That’s the real question for Tuesday night, because the goalie who forced his way out of Manitoba won’t be in the crease for his first game back.

The Devils announced Sunday night that Jake Allen is expected to start against the Jets at Canada Life Centre. Hellebuyck is 5-0-0 with a 1.96 goals-against average and a .913 save percentage since the Oct. 23 trade. He had just made 23 saves in a 4-0 win in Toronto, his first shutout with New Jersey. General manager Sunny Mehta said Hellebuyck “was adamant that he felt a duty to play on Tuesday in Winnipeg.” The team overruled him anyway, because playing him “would potentially give us a reduction in our expected win probability.”

That’s not a sentence you usually see in a team statement. Put plainly, the Devils think their chances on Tuesday are better with a rested Allen than with a starter coming off a busy week and walking back into the building he asked to leave. Coach Sheldon Keefe framed it as workload. The Toronto game was Hellebuyck’s “third game in six nights,” and he had no training camp and no preseason after Winnipeg suspended him on Sept. 16 for not reporting.

So the betting question shifts. Going into the week, it was whether a perfect start justified shading the Devils’ price for the return game. Now it’s whether the market has separated a 13-5-0 team on a heater from the goalie who’s been getting the credit for it.

Break the streak into its parts and the answer gets less tidy.

Start with Hellebuyck himself. A .913 save percentage is good. It isn’t extraordinary, and the low goals-against number says as much about the skaters as about the goalie. Work backward from those two figures and he’s been facing something like 22 or 23 shots per 60 minutes, which is a team keeping volume down. After the Leafs game, Hellebuyck said “the way the guys have been playing in front of me has just been awesome.” That’s normally just good manners. In this case the numbers mostly back him up.

The fifth win of the streak wasn’t his, though. On Saturday the Devils beat the Islanders 5-4 in overtime after Allen allowed four goals through two periods, stopping 19 of 23 shots, and New Jersey finished with more than twice as many shots on goal as New York. Allen is 6-3-0 this season with a 3.20 GAA and an .881 save percentage in nine appearances. On trade day, AP had the Allen and Nico Daws tandem at a combined .880, 23rd of 32 teams. The record with Allen is fine. The save percentage is what a bettor shouldn’t look past.

Then there’s Winnipeg. The Jets are 7-8-3, but they’ve won three straight after going 0-7-2 in their previous nine. Sunday’s 4-3 win over Tampa Bay came on a Mark Scheifele one-timer on a 5-on-3 with 1.6 seconds left, after the Jets let a 3-0 third-period lead disappear. They scored three power-play goals that night. Both halves of that game matter here. A team that gives up three goals in a period hasn’t fixed its problems, and a team that’s starting to convert with the man advantage is exactly the wrong matchup for a goalie sitting at .881.

None of this makes the Devils’ decision a bad one. They paid an $8.5 million cap hit that runs through 2030-31 for a three-time Vezina winner with no camp behind him. They host Washington on Thursday and play in Washington on Saturday. Keefe’s point that “this is a goaltender that’s not going to play every game of the season” is a reminder that New Jersey traded for April, not for one emotional night in November. Taking a small hit to their odds against a sub-.500 team is a defensible trade-off for a club that’s 9-1-0 in its last 10.

That’s the team’s trade-off, though, not the bettor’s.

For the market, Tuesday is an odd test. On a normal night the backup’s name goes into the line, the adjustment is modest, and everyone moves on. Here, every preview will lead with Hellebuyck, and the actual matchup is Allen against a Jets team that just found its power play. If the Devils still open priced close to where they’d sit with Hellebuyck in net, that suggests the streak is being priced on reputation rather than on who’s stopping pucks, and the Winnipeg side becomes the more interesting look. If the number has already moved well toward the Jets, New Jersey’s shot suppression and 9-1-0 run may make the Devils reasonable again at the shorter price. Neither is a lock. The point is that the starter news is the variable, and the record isn’t.

There are two ways this can go, and the box score should show which one happened. If the Devils keep Winnipeg in the low 20s for shots and stay out of the penalty box, the streak was mostly about the team, and the Devils’ price can hold whoever starts. If the Jets get several power plays and cash a couple, that’s evidence that a .913 goalie and an .881 goalie aren’t interchangeable. In that case the market should be pricing the save percentage, not the record.