Patrik Elias trying…and failing again at the shootout

All through the first period when the Devils got off to yet another sluggish start, eventually falling behind 2-0 in a crucial home game against Phoenix last night, I knew what the tone of this blog was going to be.  Even after the Devils came back to get a point and played much better in the last two periods, it went for naught as they went down to defeat in the dreaded skills competition yet again and were only able to gain a point on the Wings, who lost in regulation against the Canadiens.  Listening to the postgame driving home, coach Pete DeBoer emphasized how he thought it was a winning effort and offered up compliments to the opposing goalie for about the fiftieth time this season.  That’s another thing…the Coyotes didn’t even have goalie Mike Smith who was injured in the Yotes’ loss at the Garden the other night.  No starter?  No problem, not against us anyway.  Backup Thomas Greiss‘s win last night was the eighteenth defeat we’ve suffered at the hands of a backup goaltender this season, a staggering number.  And let’s not even get into the 0-9 in the shootouts or 1-26 in scoring attempts.  It’s those two statistics – nine losses without a win in the shootout and eighteen losses to backups – that will most likely keep us out of the playoffs this year.

This idea that we somehow deserved better last night though…maybe in a hockey sense it was true, since after the opening twenty minutes the Devils did play well.  However, in the end everyone got what they deserved last night – including the crowd, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Going into last night’s game Martin Brodeur had lost his last three games – granted, he’d played very well in two – and Cory Schnieder won his prior two starts, including his best post-Olympic performance on Sunday night against Toronto.  Earlier in the season Cory did not get the benefit of the doubt multiple times when he played well but the team didn’t give him goal support, while Marty played because he was the ‘hot goalie’ (re: winning games).  So what do we do last night?  Start Marty again, of course.  Which I wouldn’t have had an issue with had the Devils given Cory the same opportunities to play after tough defeats earlier in the season.  Plus Cory still hasn’t played two straight games since the break, and it took him till last Sunday (his second game in four days) to finally get his groove back.  Despite the fact Marty yet again alluded to being intrigued about moving on and having his kids beg him to go to Ottawa or Minnesota in the same contreversial interview where he and Sean Avery went at it yet again – see Derek’s post below – this organization continues to bend over backwards for MB30.  And for what?  If he’s going to walk at the end of the season anyway – which can’t seem to happen fast enough reading all these quotes – then what exactly is the point of pacifying him now?

Fittingly, the Devils paid for their organization-wide hypocrisy almost immediately when Brodeur allowed a soft trickler through the five-hole to Kyle Chipchura just 2:21 into last night’s game.  As mad as I was at Marty and the organization for going against it’s whole ‘team is bigger than the individual’ phlosophy with MB30 this year, I was just as annoyed at the crowd before the game started, for cheering when Bryce Salvador was announced as a scratch.  While I have my issues with Sal’s play and the fact re-signing him is in effect the reason Adam Larsson and Eric Gelinas have been continually bounced or blocked from the lineup, there’s a difference between not wanting him to play and cheering him being hurt (and he is hurt, although it’s certainly possible some of the airheads in the crowd thought he was being scratched for inefficiency).  Especially a high-class guy like Sal – although he’s bland as heck and declining as a player, he’s still a warrior that didn’t deserve that.  Last night was one of the times I was kind of glad we’re not in a hockey market like Montreal or Toronto, cause you know someone in the media would have noticed and asked questions just waiting for the pointed response that would surely come from a loyal teammate.  Then again, the crowd deserved to be called out for that last night.

Ironically the guy who got in the lineup because of Salvador’s injury was Jacob Josefson, a forward – but the real beneficiary in terms of icetime (and the main reason the crowd was cheering Sal’s absence) was Eric Gelinas, who was back to playing defense full-time after a pair of games being a ‘rover’ between forward and D.  And it was Gelinas who took a horrendous penalty in the first period – one of three the Devils committed – hitting David Moss when he clearly didn’t have the puck.  In general things are testy around the arena, between Devil fans on various message boards and social media outlets, I guess that’s to be expected given the way things have gone since that fateful July 4 nearly two years ago where Zach Parise went home and essentially took the Devils’ status as an upper-echelon team with him.  DeBoer himself has been getting increasingly louder boos during his introductions the last few home games.  While I won’t partake in that either (despite my problems with the head coach, I’m not going to actively boo him as long as he’s still our coach), at least that’s understandable given our losing the last two seasons.  Particularly after a drab first period where the entire team deserved boos.  NHL.com’s Dan Rosen was succinct and accurate when criticizing the Devils’ first-period play:

Dan Rosen ‏@drosennhl  21h

The Devils are 5 points back, desperate need of points, and after 20 minutes they trail 1-0, have 4 shots on goal and 3 penalties.

Perhaps after the first twenty minutes the message finally got through that hey we’d better start skating here.  However, despite two early Phoenix penalties in the second, the Devils’ fifth-ranked power play failed to cash in and despite dominating the second period in terms of shots (13-6), they fell further behind when Chris Summers rifled one past Brodeur through a screen at 16:57.  Was our season really going to end this way?  It sure looked that way, until a strange play at the end of the second period that got us back in it.  Defenseman Jon Merrill was skating into the zone, holding the puck for seconds – minutes, it seemed to me – causing me to scream ‘shoot!’ with a mild expletive at the end of it.  Finally Merrill shot from behind the goalline towards the netmouth, where it hit Ryane Clowe‘s shoulder and improbably went in with .3 seconds on the clock.  After a short review, the goal stood and the Devils suddenly were revived again, like the proverbial cat with nine lives.

Even with that momentum-changer things still didn’t look too great when we fumbled away another power play, giving up a partial breakaway to Brandon McMillan where Brodeur could have easily skated out to play the puck away but misjudged it.  To his credit he not only made the save on McMillan, but rebounded from that tough start and kept us in the game until Adam Henrique‘s slick theft and stuff home at the side of the net tied the game at 10:32 with his twenty-fourth goal of the season (already well past his career high).  Though the Devils tied the game, they were far from out of the woods and each team survived some hair-raising chances to go to overtime.  When Patrik Elias was stopped on a one-timer by Greiss early in OT, I felt one way or another we wouldn’t be getting the second point tonight.  Amazingly it seemed as if both teams were playing for the shootout by the end of OT which would be pretty moronic from a Devils standpoint.  It was all I could do to avoid turning around when a moronic Devil fan behind me actually stated he wanted the shootout and saying to him ‘are you out of your mind?!’.

Clearly not everyone is fully aware of how historic our failures have been at the skills competition this season.  Whoever wasn’t, got another reminder last night when DeBoer went with the same three guys he’s gone with in most of the shootouts – Damien Brunner, Clowe and Elias.  Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  While DeBoer made the point that he didn’t want to ‘pick names out of a hat when your season’s on the line’, when nothing else is working, why not?  Especially when recent acquisition Tuomo Ruutu‘s been historically as good as anyone on our team at the skills competition, and not burdened by the season-long failure our other skaters are.  While it’s a stretch to blame DeBoer for the shootout woes, fact is we probably got what we deserved by not heeding the Einstein definition of insanity.  True to form all three shooters failed while Mikael Boedker’s opening goal was enough to give the Yotes an extra point.

Despite the help we got from Montreal last night, the fact is we probably still need to go 8-1…maybe 7-2 or 7-1-1 bare minimum to make it.  A run we still haven’t proved we’re capable of yet this season, schedule be damned.  All you can do is play one game at a time…starting with tomorrow night on Long Island.  And finish the game before sixty-five minutes.