Before the Devils played the Flyers on Tuesday, coach Pete DeBoer referred to this stretch of four games in six days (with the first three at home) as a moving week, akin to Saturday at the Masters – where you either make a charge up the leaderboard or fall by the wayside.  For the normally close to the vest coach that was a telling and honest assessment of where the Devils were and are as a team, considering they began the week four points back of a playoff spot and with more than half the games played on the schedule, time is starting to run out.  At the moment things look a little better with three points in their first two games this week, and with the Atlantic teams falling by the wayside there’s now hope that the Metro can actually have more than three playoff teams.

Of course that’ll all mean very little if the Devils don’t take care of business this weekend, playing the Panthers at home tomorrow followed by a trip to Toronto on Sunday night to play an up-and-down Leafs team that’s lost three in a row since the Winter Classic.  Last night’s 1-0 win over the Stars doesn’t really suggest the Devils’ scoring problem is about to dissapear anytime soon, especially with Patrik Elias and Damien Brunner still out with injuries.  Elias skated lightly today and Brunner’s supposedly ahead of schedule in his return from a knee injury but who knows when either’s going to be back, really?  Considering Elias’s injury was supposed to be minor you really can’t count on the Devils for honest assessments of their players’ status.  What is certain is that the Devils have to find scoring from somewhere besides Jaromir Jagr, especially now that teams are shutting down his line more frequently.

Slowly but surely Michael Ryder‘s been asserting himself as the legit scoring threat everyone knows he can be.  While Jagr still has the team lead by a mile in points (ten ahead of the currently injured Elias), Ryder’s taken over the team lead in goals with his fifteenth last night, playing another good game against one of his former teams with six shots on goal.  In fact I’m almost hoping we trade him and he plays with every other team in the league before coming back here, given some of his performances against teams he used to play for this season – like the Habs for example, where he scored in back-to-back games.  Ryder’s goal was vitally important for as usual Cory Schnieder only had that slim margin to work with for most of the night.  To his credit Schneider made it stand up in a brilliant performance, turning aside 26 Dallas shots to put up his third shutout of the season in a tense 1-0 win.  After his holiday break to ‘mentally and physically reset’, Schnieder’s picked up his game again, giving up just three goals in his last three starts and even getting a pair of wins despite only getting a combined four goals of support in those games.  As the goalie would be the first to point out though, he had a lot of help from his friends as the Devils blocked eighteen shots last night, an unusually high number considering blocked shots haven’t been a big part of our game as long as Martin Brodeur‘s been in goal.  Not to mention the Devils’ penalty kill did the job on a crucial double-minor kill of a Stephen Gionta penalty late in the second period.

I couldn’t stay away from the game entirely last night though I did not turn it on until late in the second period, and then turned it back off after Gionta’s penalty until midway through the third where I watched the finish.  From what I saw it looked like the same game we’ve played about fifty times since the beginning of last season, a tense low-scoring game where every mistake can be fatal.  Stars coach Lindy Ruff remarked about the Devils that going through our defense was like ‘climbing through a barbed-wire fence in a sweater’.  Sometimes that’s what it feels like watching these games too, Lindy.  To their credit, the Devils’ seven-man battalion played well enough to get the job done although Cory clearly earned not only the first star but also a second straight start tomorrow night, the first time he’s gotten two consecutive starts since early December.  Among the few other Devils to deserve special notice was Travis Zajac, who played nearly 25 minutes last night leading the team in icetime in an energized performance after the birth of his daughter two days ago.  While Zajac’s scoring has hit another dry spell, his overall game continues to be strong.

I’ll be sitting in the lower bowl tomorrow, taking advantage of one of the many vouchers the Devils have been handing out this year after everything from toy donations to food donations to a coat drive.  Hey, if everyone else can take advantage of these babies I might as well do so myself, so I sold my regular seats and am sitting in section 3 behind the attacking net tomorrow, enough rows up so that I shouldn’t have any blind spots on the ice.  Usually the only time I sit below is when I deign to go to a preseason game, which hasn’t happened in a couple years between the lockout last year and my lack of interest in going to one in mid-September this year. I’m not particularly anxious to find out what this ‘arena takeover’ by Party Poker is tomorrow night, I just hope it isn’t as annoying as those orange Mercedes Benz ads on the ice immediately after the lockout.  At least the temperature is supposed to pick up tomorrow although we had another annoying snowstorm this morning.  I honestly don’t know how people in Canada or Buffalo put up with this and far worse besides.  Oh well, whatever they do it would be nice to see a home win again.  Of the five home games I’ve missed four have been Devil wins (three of them shutouts).  My only in-person win in the last month plus was December 18 against Ottawa.  A few more losses and I may just start no-showing to these games.  Then again with eight road games and a de facto neutral site among our last thirteen games before the Olympic break, there aren’t going to be a lot of opportunities to go to games over the next six weeks anyway.  At least that’s one way to avoid bad weather this winter.

If you want to look at it another way though, I’m still at NHL .500 somehow in my games attended (5-5-6).  New Jersey as a team is at NHL .500 (18-18-9), so from that perspective I guess I’m at par for the course.  Regardless, for the Devils to make the playoffs, both numbers’ll have to improve and soon.