For the better part of a week, I’ve been looking forward to Penguins-Devils tomorrow afternoon.  Not only is it the front end of a home-and-home that will determine who will be in first place by the end of the weekend, but it’s always fun to have a weekend afternoon game with rivals playing – especially with the start the Devils have gotten off to.  There’s also the matter of showing we can play with the Penguins after our no-show in Pittsburgh last weekend.  And on top of that, I was going to see a few people who for one reason or another I haven’t seen at games yet this season.

Of course the calendar being what it is (February), Mother Nature has decided to intervene and throw a monkey wrench into all that with a projected 18 inches of snow in North Jersey with gusting winds…not to mention even more than that in some pockets of the Northeast like Long Island, and the New England area.  So much for the mythical groundhog, and an early end to winter, eh?  Boston already did the right thing by their fans and players and pushed the Bruins’ home game with Tampa Bay back from 1 PM tomorrow to 7 PM, giving the city a few more hours to dig out of what should be the worst of Nemo.

It would be nice if the Devils did the same with our game, since both teams are playing each other at night on Sunday and have little travel involved they can afford to take another few hours to play tomorrow as well, and get everyone in safely after the storm has subsided…but I’m not holding my breath.  Two years ago before we decided to name every single snowstorm, there was a whopper the day after Christmas for a otherwise forgettable game between a then-dreadful Devils team and a Maple Leafs team also floundering.  If you recall, that storm was so bad it even got an NFL game postponed.  Of course, the NHL decided to go ahead with the scheduled Devils and Islanders home games that day (despite the Islanders’ own request for a postponement).

Nobody was hurt as far as we know, but things could have been really bad.  Patrik Elias and Travis Zajac were literally sleeping in Elias’s car because they were stranded on the highway after the game, and then-Devil Rod Pelley was literally helping strangers get their car out of a ditch.  That’s to say nothing of what the few thousand fans and arena workers had to go through with their own delays and car troubles.  This coming storm might even be worse than that one was, with at least a foot and a half to three feet and 50-60 MPH winds throughout the Northeast.  There’s already been a steady flow of snow throughout the day with a couple of breaks, but the worst is supposedly still to come.  Maybe the storm will end by tomorrow morning, and maybe it won’t.  That doesn’t help the arena workers who’ll have to be driving in before then, especially with public transportation shutting down left and right (including the Morris line on NJ Transit).

I realize that it’s near impossible to postpone a game in the NHL the way you do in baseball, especially in a shortened season, but pushing the game back a few hours when it’s practical will help everyone involved.  You think the teams want to be busing to the arena while the storm’s still going on and roads haven’t been cleared?  You think the NHL wants a Saturday afternoon first-place showdown to be played in front of an army of crickets?  It’s not as if it’s unprecedented for the NHL to push games back, they pushed the Winter Classic with the Capitals and Penguins back from daytime to nighttime because of weather concerns.  Shoot, they even pushed a couple of Opening Day games back a half hour so that NBC could broadcast the Kings’ banner raising.

Of course, the NHL and its teams get macho like bare-chested Green Bay Packer fans in winter and generally only postpone the start time of a game if there’s a federal emergency involved like in Boston.  So long as the teams and refs get into the city (which generally they will early), the NHL show must go on.  And that’s all well and good, but what happens the first time some fan, arena worker or heaven forbid a player get seriously hurt in an accident because the NHL doesn’t want to have a weather delay?  I realize fans have to take responsibility for themselves in the end, but arena workers and others who ‘have’ to be at the game don’t have that luxury.

As Devil fans, we know something about snowstorms given the mythology surrounding the ‘334 club’ (the number of fans who attended one January game in 1987 between the Devils and Calgary at the Meadowlands) despite a particuarly bad storm with fifteen inches of snow which delayed the game nearly two hours because only thirteen players got to the arena on time.  This was also in the days before mass transit was involved in getting to and from Devils games.  While it’s a cute story in the end because nobody got hurt and the Devils celebrated those in attendance with free tickets and commemorating the occasion with a special sweater, pin and other unique stuff, I do have to admit wincing over the thought of enduring such hardships to watch one regular season hockey game.  It’s nice to love the Devils, but at some point your own personal well-being has to prevail, which is probably why I’m going to have to sit out tomorrow assuming the storm is as bad as advertised and our game isn’t pushed back.

Pushing the Bruins’ game back to 7 PM was a good start but the NHL needs to do the right thing and push back the other Northeast start times in Philly and New Jersey as well.