Devils CEO Scott O’Neill announcing PartyPoker sponsorship

Instead of my semi-usual recap of another soul-crushing defeat Tuesday or a recap of what will likely be a blowout defeat tonight at the hands of a Stars team who’ll no doubt be ready to play after getting whipped by the Isles a couple of nights ago, I wanted to do something different today.  Especially since there is a lot to discuss, so this will in effect be a potpourri post – only partly with Devil news and opinions.  I just didn’t want to sit here and run through the same complaints about the team yet again.  Like Cory Schnieder a while back, I need to hit the reset button mentally and physically on this season and come back refreshed on Saturday, so I probably won’t watch or recap tonight’s game unless it’s on replay later and we actually (gasp) win.

What’s the point really?  Aside from the entertainment value whoever else reads my rants gets out of it, which can also get a little stale if that’s all I wind up doing.  I can sit here and go nuts on Pete DeBoer toying with the idea of converting Eric Gelinas into a forward, and really the organization’s whole treatment of Gelinas this week which has been mind-boggling.  From announcing he was getting sent down on Saturday to effectively rescinding it Monday only to scratch him and then put him back in the lineup as a seventh defenseman while publicly musing about him playing forward without ever bringing it up to the rookie himself.  I can roll my eyes over Jacob Josefson‘s well-timed ‘virus’ that conveniently opened up a roster spot for Lou Lamoriello to re-claim defenseman Alex Urbom from the Capitals and finally be able to put him in Albany, just the latest of Lou’s shell games with the roster the last two seasons.  I can be skeptical of Adam Larsson being sent down to Albany and how long his erstatz conditioning stint will last (probably as long as it takes for Josefson’s ‘virus’ to magically hit someone else who isn’t playing).  God knows I’ve done enough complaining about the gang that couldn’t shoot straight the last two years or their inability to hold a lead – ever.

Really however, what’s any of that going to accomplish?  Other than increasing my agida tenfold.  Sometimes complaining (especially in the form of writing) is theraputic to be sure – I’m sure Derek will agree with this – but sometimes rehasing only increases my aggravation too.  Especially in this age of insta-news and a million outlets to discuss it.  For example, visiting message boards probably isn’t a good idea when the team isn’t doing as well.  Other than making you feel smarter when you realize how off the deep end a lot of other people are, I suppose, or reinforcing some of your own criticisms.  Sometimes it’s just best to drop the worrying about roster management, palace intrigue, etc and just enjoy the games.  Especially with the Olympic break coming up and it being more and more likely by the week that there’ll be no Devils hockey past the second week of April.

Of course it’s hard not to get caught up in all of that given the team’s not winning.  It would be easier to overlook the fact we’re systematically retarding the development of almost anyone under 25 and hindering what limited offensive talent we have if we were winning now.  Likewise, it would be easier to accept not winning if we were at least developing and giving our younger players real experience.  Right now though, we’re not doing either.  On some level it’s actually hilarious that Mattias Tedenby has more goals down in Albany in a handful of games than he has the last three years as a Devil.  Perhaps there’s some magnet in the nets around the NHL that repels pucks from going in off Devil sticks.  Tuesday’s game against the Flyers was a perfect example of how offensively challenged this team is.  During a first period where we could have had 25 shots on goal if we weren’t looking for the perfect play all the time, we still dominated the period and yet only managed an Adam Henrique goal in the first minute of the game.  That game had all the elements that will make you pull your hair out as a Devil fan – bad offense, yet another blown lead, a wild comeback (in this case a game-tying goal from Michael Ryder in the final minute that got us a -1 from the Flyer game instead of a -2 in the standings) and eventual defeat in overtime.  Right now we’re essentially closer to the last-place Isles than we are to a playoff spot in the Metro.

Like I said before though, I don’t want this piece to be a Charlie Brown-like tale of woe where I rant about how Lucy pulled the football away yet again.  So what else is there to talk about?  Well if you haven’t been in a cave the last seventy-two hours you know the Devils and NBA’s Sixers – both teams owned by Josh Harris and David Blitzer – are now partnering with an online gambling site (PartyPoker).  If anything the constant trumpeting of this new sponsorship is already a turnoff though I’m certainly not averse to the team making money or even partnering with a gambling site which I could care less about.  However the way this has been thrown in everyone’s face the last few days is the online version of turning the volume up on commercials.  Really, has there ever been 1/100th of the hype for ANY other sponsor?  I realize why it’s a big deal, this is really the first overt partnership of a major professional sports team with a gambling entity but the attention was just laughable, with social media continuing to trumpet a super-secret announcement even after press releases had sussed out exactly what it was.  Of course part of my annoyance came over the intial Devils Tweet which I allowed myself to believe meant we were getting an All-Star game:

New Jersey Devils ‏@NHLDevils7 Jan

The #NJDevils and @PruCenter will be going “all-in” with a big announcement on Thursday! Stay tuned for more info!

Of course the next tweet saying ‘we’re not bluffing’ about a big announcement a day later pretty much was a clue that it was not about a future All-Star game, and that all-in was referring to poker, not hockey.  Oh well, I’m sure one day soon we will get one of those since most of the new arenas have had All-Star games, and plus we just had an NHL Draft go off smoothly without a hitch in Newark.  I guess it was hard to expect everything in one fell swoop given the draft and the outdoor game in the last calendar year, though my annoyance with the weather this year has reinforced my initial reluctance to actually go to the Stadium Series or whatever our outdoor game and the other satelite games are called.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the 24/7 series on HBO (though this year the first three episodes of Toronto-Detroit lacked a little meat that only the last one really did) and the Winter Classic itself and I’ll be looking forward to watching this game probably on TV.

Looking at the vista and being in it are two different animals though.  Especially when the sub-zero wind chill walking to and from the arena to the parking lot on Tuesday brought that point home yet again.  Not to mention leaving around 9 AM to make the train (assuming there aren’t snow delays!) and get in the stadium in time for a 12:30 game, and essentially revolving the whole day around it.  Time consumed is part of the reason why I go to fewer baseball games than hockey games, it’s really a whole day excursion going to the city.  It’s much easier to spend forty minutes driving into and out of Newark than over two hours each way on trains and subways.  Of course the current state of my Mets has something to do with that too given that I was going to around 7-10 games during ’06-07 and top out at 2-3 per season these days.  And that’s when it’s nice out, for the most part.  I’m not a big fan of sitting in the cold weather either, though the Meadowlands is closer and there’s even mass transit now I hadn’t been to a Jets game in several years until attending a win against the Bills early this season.  That said I’d probably find my way to a Jet AFC Championship game if they ever had one at MetLife, January cold and all.  I’d surely find my way to Met games after August if they ever had big October baseball again.  I was a plan ticket holder in 2006 and got to attend the first game of the playoffs – which was a wild win over the Dodgers.  I would have gotten to attend a World Series game that year too, but we know how that NLCS ended.

These days it’s hard to even pay attention to baseball though I was into it enough to win an online fantasy baseball keeper league I entered into this year.  Fantasy sports – whether you’re playing for bragging rights, money or both – often are a fun way to stay involved when your real-life teams aren’t giving you much to watch.  Or even when they do, it can be a nice supplement to it.  Of course, I only play for bragging rights…playing for money is far too stressful for me.  I’m competitive to the point where even playing for bragging rights can be stressful at times.  Usually it’s only my two fantasy football league(s) that drive me to distraction though.  Though this year I finally won a coveted championship in the NJDevs board league after six straight seasons of finishing in the top four, doing it in the most unlikely fashion possible after gaining entry to the playoffs as a 6-7 team (though one that led the league in scoring).  Generally the format itself is stressful though, the whole head-to-head and one and done part of it.  With baseball it was head-to-head too but even that is over a week’s worth of games as opposed to a single day.

My twenty-team hockey league is rotisserie and thus not as prone to wild up-and-down swings and fluke results.  Plus I’ve won this league four times and other than several regular managers like me it’s generally not that active anyway since it’s a message board league so I’m not living and dying as much with it (particularly while I was immersed in my fantasy football playoff run this year), though it would be nice to dethrone the two-time defending champ before he wins yet again.  Perhaps the one issue I have with fantasy sports is having to count on rival players for production, especially when they’re playing your real-life team.  This is yet another reason why I will not play fantasy sports for money.  I don’t neccesarily avoid those players per se, I’ve kind of justified having them as a double-edged sword – either they do well for me or they stink and that helps my real-life team.  It’s the old glass half-full, half-empty scenario, others would see that in the light of either your fantasy team gets hurt or your real-life team does.  Sometimes having your real-life players is worse in a way cause then you’re really all-in on their production when they don’t do well.  I bring this up because of a situation that came up in my league over the last week, with the injury to the Wild’s Mikko Koivu (usually a guy I’ll draft every year cause he’s underrated and strong in faceoff wins).  Being down to only two ‘true’ centers in Ryan Johansen and Mikhail Grabovski with Cody Hodgson also out and wanting to put one of them at RW to up my faceoff total, I needed to acquire another fill-in center.  So I wound up traing Ryan O’Reilly – a LW with center eligibility but he’s almost useless at C cause he doesn’t take as many faceoffs this year – for…Derek Stepan.  So now I’m hoping Stepan picks up his offense just enough for the Rangers to lose 5-4 regulation games lol.

Getting back to my point about how fantasy helps you keep up on the league, I probably wouldn’t know who Johansen (a young up-and-comer for the Blue Jacket) was if I didn’t pick him up as a FA early in the season and roll with him in my lineup most of the season.  Or even a guy like the Bolts’ Ondrej Palat who I picked up in the midst of his recent scoring binge, who might help fill the void left by the trade of O’Reilly and the injury issues of Johan Franzen at my LW position.  At least I still have Patrick Marleau of the Sharks as my top LW.  My lineup is still pretty strong overall in spite of the injuries and dissapointment in my Chicago goalies’ low save percentage/shutout totals.  I need an improvement there and in plus-minus in the second half to make a push.

C – Grabovski, Stepan, Koivu (IR), LW – Marleau, Franzen (IR), M. Raymond, Palat, RW – Ovechkin, Johansen, Cole, Chiasson, Hodgson (IR), D – Weber, Phaneuf, Bouwmeester, Dillon, Trouba, G – Crawford, Raanta, Grubauer

Anyway, enough of a tangent…I’m off to relax for the night.  I’ll be back at recapping after Saturday’s game though, I’m sure there’ll be something to talk about by then.  Hopefully it won’t be back to the same old same old by then.