http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=055wFyO6gag

Or maybe this Charlie Brown YouTube sums up our season even better than the actual joke of a hockey game that took place tonight in the dump known as Nassau.  Like Lucy holding out the football, teams in front of the Devils kept losing just enough to where you thought maybe, just maybe with one hot streak the Devils had a chance at getting into playoff position.  And then just as we get another chance to take advantage, boom we go flying up in the air and miss kicking the proverbial football yet again.  Every single time this season when the Devils could gain ground or really get a foothold in the race, they’ve invariably found a way to screw it up.  Despite all their disasters – the 0-9 in shootouts, the eighteen losses to backup goalies, the fact they’ve only had one three-game winning streak – they still entered today’s game against Bridgeport (which is honestly what we faced tonight) four points out of a spot with nine games left.  Even with Columbus and Detroit winning their games tonight, at least the Devils would have held their ground and gotten closer to clearing the Caps and a fading Leafs team even worse than us right now.

Perhaps tonight was a fitting end – finally – to a Devils season that was essentially DOA with Ilya Kovalchuk‘s departure to Russia coupled with an 0-4-3 start that we just could never put enough consistent hockey together to make up for.  A fitting end in that we lost our tenth game in the shootout, again not scoring, again with Cory Schnieder looking like a statue in the skills competition.  Fitting in that we lost our nineteenth game to a backup with the immortal Anders Nilsson shutting us down AGAIN, only giving up an Adam Henrique breakaway goal despite looking shaky on some of his saves at times.  As one-time captain Zach Parise once said (ironically enough after Nilsson shut us out three years ago), a pee wee goalie could have made most of those saves.  Didn’t help that it seems like the Devils need the Charlie Sheen glasses from Major League to see the net since they had several point-blank chances and missed the net entirely…even Jaromir Jagr wasn’t immune to that tonight.

Even worse than the actual loss from my perspective, is that to a degree I somehow expected this.  The minute I saw the Isles lineup – without guys like John Tavares, Kyle Okposo, Lubomir Vishnovsky and Mark Streit to name a few – I had a bad feeling about this game.  Which was doubled when I saw Nilsson was in net, and of course he wound up being the nineteenth backup goalie to beat us.  Despite playing a minor league team I actually feared the worst to such an extent I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the first half of a vitally crucial game.  Of course that proved to be a good thing since the Devils had a meager two – TWO! – shots on Nilsson in a typically sluggish first period.  What was even more comical about the first period is the fact coach Pete DeBoer restored Steve Bernier to the lineup and moved Danius Zubrus to center because he was worried about the Isles playing a physical game.  Comical because the coach was right, except to the extent that the players he put in didn’t exactly help based on the fact the Isles outhit us 19-4 in the first period (no that’s not a misprint).  Yes, not having physical defensemen Anton Volchenkov and Bryce Salvador didn’t help but come on.  At least look like you want the game more than a team of young players just looking to make individual impressions.

Of course the Devils team of slow starters picked it up after the first to a degree, although they fell behind in spectacularly inept fashion early in the second period when a Frans Nielsen pass was directed away by Peter Harrold, right off the leg of Patrik Elias and past Schnieder at 2:12.  I was still following this game online and via Twitter at that point but right then I was already comparing this game to previous disasters against the Isles…really it’s amazing just how many bad losses we’ve had against a team that’s been a non-factor aside from the shortened season last year.  Both of the ones that immediately come to mind were from 2010’s hideous first half, when we lost to them on Long Island just after Thanksgiving in a 2-0 shutout when they were coming in off a fourteen-game losing streak, and the pre-Christmas 5-1 fiasco at home when Jacques Lemaire made his third return as a coach and remarked afterward how we looked like we lost our ability to play the game.  There’ve been other bad ones to be sure over the last several years, including a desultory home loss late last year during our spiral of death.

Even after I finally turned the game on just after Henrique’s tying goal midway through the second I didn’t feel much better about the game.  Aside from a couple of comical breakdowns defensively on our power play (one of which earned Eric Gelinas a return trip to Pete’s chateau bow-wow for the third period), we managed to keep the shot total down at least, though we couldn’t up our shot total with inept play in the offensive zone and constantly missing the net on point-blank chances.  Our utter lack of skating speed doesn’t help but I’ve gone through this time and again, how we struggle against teams like these Isles, the Jets, the Sabres even – teams that might not have much talent but speed to burn and just enough skill to take advantage of our plodders.  Once the game dragged into OT the urgency was there to end it before the dreaded skills competition but despite getting a handful of shots and at least a couple of missed nets and one other chance where Marek Zidlicky was open but got the puck stolen from behind with a diving pokecheck, nearly giving up a breakaway at the other end.

Of course when time ran out in the overtime, it could be argued it also ran out on our season – which given our shooters’ collective failure and Schnieder’s futility in the skills competition there was really no way out of the spiral of suck.  I correctly opined before the shootout that Isles coach Jack Capuano should go first with skills ace Frans Nielsen and go for a quick kill, which is exactly how the skills competition played out.  Unfortunately, Devils coach DeBoer didn’t follow my advice or anyone else’s and went essentially with the same ol’ same ol’ in the skills competition.  I understand putting out Henrique despite his own futility in the skills competition given how hot he’s been in the second half.  I’m glad they took Elias out of the ‘anchor’ position to take some pressure off at least.  Still, you’d think we could give Tuomo Ruutu a try in the shootout?  With his nearly 40% career record and the fact he’s not weighed down by the team’s futility since he hasn’t taken a shot as a Devil yet?  Or Zidlicky for that matter, he has a respectable record (moreso than Damien Brunner, who was slated to go third) and yet he hasn’t gotten a chance this year either.   Granted Brunner had another strong game tonight but most of the time the best hockey players aren’t the best skills competition players.  You’d think at some point it would occur to this coach that doing the same thing over and over again eventually you have to accept isn’t going to yield different results.

Granted I can’t blame Deboer entirely for NHL players being laughably inept at a skills competition.  There’s no excuse for the team to be 1-30 or whatever it is shooting the puck, or for Schnieder to be an utter statue allowing a five-hole goal to the immortal Brock Nelson on his second shot.  For all our shooting woes, five of our ten shootouts we’ve trailed before a shooter even stepped onto the ice.  Still, even if you wound up doing something unconventional like pulling Cory for a cold Martin Brodeur in the skills competition would it really matter?  So we lose 1-0 instead of 2-0?  Our shootout curse has been an epic-team wide meltdown from soup to nuts this year.  Even with that I don’t want to hear complaining about the shootout tonight…this game really should have been won at some point in the 65 minutes.  Especially with our total lack of effort in the first period – AGAIN.  Eventually if you were going to get serious about making a playoff run you were going to have to put together a winning streak, which this team clearly is not capable of even if you follow up playing Bridgeport with Hartford, Abbotsfield or SKA Petersburg from the KHL.

Perhaps the only good thing about tonight’s loss is that it signals that this season is mercifully coming to an end soon.  Although at this point it won’t be soon enough either having to deal with a dead atmosphere or just eating tickets for the next four home games before our season finale on April 13 and perhaps Brodeur’s finale in a Devils uniform.