Even putting aside the numbers, last night’s game was so bad optically on its own you don’t even have to look at numbers to be worried.  After a quiet first period which resulted in few scoring chances for each team, a game of pond hockey broke out over the last forty-five minutes.  New Jersey started the scoring orgy with a bang – getting two goals in fifty-one seconds.  Our two in-season trade acquisitions started out the scoring at 5:50 when Matt D’Agostini made a nice play gaining the zone, then dropping off the puck to Andrei Loiktionov, who moved to the slot just right of the faceoff circle and fired a wrister past Mathieu Garon for his seventh goal as a Devil.  Less than a minute later, our waiver acquisition scored the second goal, when Tom Kostopolous was softly hooked on a breakaway and was given a penalty shot.  Amazingly Kostopolous converted, finding a hole through Garon with another wrister at 6:41 for his first goal as a Devil.  In a statistical oddity, Kostopolous became the only Devil ever to get his first goal with the team on a penalty shot.

Did I say last night’s game was bad?  Wel the agida started up soon after a failed clear by Peter Harrold led to an odd sequence with a Keith Aulie shot from the point bouncing off of the stick of Martin St. Louis and off defenseman Anton Volcheknov, right to Steven Stamkos in front.  Martin Brodeur actually stopped the former Richard trophy winner on the first attempt, but Stamkos used sick hand-eye coordination to deflect the rebound home while it was still in mid-air at 8:00 of the period.  Tampa’s second goal at 10:26 was even more troubling, when Richard Panik lobbed a bouncing puck toward Nate Thompson, who used rocket skates to blow by Conechenkov, then scored on a breakaway while being hooked.  Volch’s play had been improved in the last few weeks but he took a real step back last night, being on the ice for three goals against, and particularly central to those two.

Last night’s pond hockey classic continued when the Devils got a power play a couple minutes later and amazingly scored on the power play.  Again D’Agostini made a nice entry into the zone, eluding two skaters while maintaining possession, and then firing a cross-ice pass to Andy Greene, who fired a wrister past Garon from just outside the faceoff circle at 13:58 for his third of the season and the Devils’ third of the last eight plus minutes.  It should be said, our odd scoring binge was aided in no small part by Garon, who was dreadful last night letting pucks get through him.  Particuarly on our fourth goal, early in the third period – a shorthanded marker by Ryan Carter at 2:39 where he just grabbed a turnover from Stamkos and skated to the other end one-on-one with a backchecking defenseman, who kept him to the outside.  Still, Carter’s wrister managed to get through Garon for his fourth goal of the season.

At this point things looked set…up 4-2 in the third against a non-playoff team.  Unfortunately as Brodeur himself said later, Stamkos’s second of the game (and twenty-fifth of the season) at 7:11 changed the momentum back the other way.  Unlike most of Stamkos’s goals which are skill plays and slapshots of the highest quality, this one was just firing a soft wrister from the side of the net that somehow trickled through Brodeur.  Even after that, it still looked like the Devils would escape town with the two points – until the ill-fated penultimate shift of regulation. With once again Stephen Gionta‘s line being on the ice against Stamkos.   Since apparently our two top centers (Travis Zajac and Adam Henrique) who both play on the penalty kill are somehow not the best options to play against the Stamkos line in the final minute of the game going up against one of the three best players in the world right now.

I love Gionta as much as the next guy…more than most Devil fans at the moment who somehow see him as a problem.  He’s not a problem – but the overusage of him at times is.  New Lightning coach Jon Cooper got one thing right last night, throwing Stamkos on the ice against Gionta’s line and the Volchenkov defensive pair as much as humanly possible.  A guy coaching his first-ever NHL game knew how to school the Devils and that strategy paid dividends yet again last night, when after extended pressure in the zone, Gionta couldn’t reach Stamkos’s cross-ice pass to a wide-open Alex Killorn on the backdoor with just sixteen seconds remaining.

Despite conceding another power play after D’Agostini had to hook Stamkos who got open again on a breakaway, the Devils’ misery got extended through the full five-minutes and to the worst possible shootout ever.  Their two shooters – Teddy Purcell and Victor Hedman both scored on Brodeur, who’s apparently forgotten how to stop shootouts.  He took the blame himself, indicating the Devils need to start practicing the shootout.  Our two shooters (Patrik Elias and Zajac) both decided to deke themselves into oblivion against a goalie who wasn’t stopping floating wristers all game.  As a result, Garon wound up winning a shootout without actually having to make a save.  This team is just flat-out dumb sometimes.  Shooting and not deking against a goalie who takes up most of the net, while they deke themselves out of their own skates against a goalie who couldn’t catch a cold.

I don’t buy into the fact that this game could be a season-turner for us – yet.  Ask me again after Monday.  New Jersey needs to get a positive result out of these two upcoming games, and I don’t mean OT losses.  At some point you have to actually win games to make the playoffs, especially when the schedule toughens up considerably after this weekend.  Defensively they need to be more consistent to win, despite last night’s perofrmance they don’t have the offense that last year’s team did, when they were able to bail the Devils out of blowing three-goal leads in the playoffs.

This is a huge stretch, where we could either be seven points up or squarely on the bubble by Monday night.  Just win these two games and last night’s forgotten.  If things continue to go south though, last night may well be looked at as a flashpoint where giving away points all season to bad teams finally burned us fatally.