The Devils’ christmas present to its fans (hint: it’s a lump of coal)

Maybe I’m dating myself with this reference but tonight sitting at the arena watching another disgraceful Devil ‘effort’, I felt like Billy Crystal in the movie Forget Paris, where he plays a basketball referee and at one point short-circuits and starts tossing everyone from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the waterboy out of the arena.  Cause right now personally I’ve had it with everyone and everything associated with this team…with the possible exception of Keith Kinkaid.  And even though I love the kid and you couldn’t have asked more from him in his first three starts, the godding up of him and fans wanting to trade Cory Schneider to give him the starting job after two weeks is a little bit much.  I even heard my former seatmates at the arena tonight say we should trade Cory to play Kinkaid.

Granted I still have no use for Cory right now myself, and if he sat a few games in a row I wouldn’t cry about it, but I’m still not ready to pull a Paul Holmgren.  We (as Devil fans) can’t complain about guys like Zach Parise, Scott Niedermayer, Bobby Holik, etc leaving us and then want to trade someone that did sign with us long-term.  Although after nights like tonight you wonder who’ll be asking for a trade first, Cory or Carmelo Anthony?  I might be kidding…might be.  All three goals Cory allowed tonight were a comedy of errors worthy of the Major League bad Indians montage.  Goal number one was a bomb by Mike Green, who was so wide open he looked like he was standing out in the middle of the ocean all by himself after Tim Sestito went over to cover Jack Hillen – hint, he’s not the guy with the 105 MPH slapshot – leaving Green with all the time and space in the world.  Goal number two saw Andy Greene go to cover Alex Ovechkin, who happened to be falling to the ice and Peter Harrold go behind the net chasing a skater, leaving Nicklas Backstrom wide open for a bang-bang wrister from the faceoff dot people couldn’t wait to blame Cory on.  That wasn’t even in the top ten of bad goals Cory’s allowed this year but let’s ignore all the other nonsense going on during that play or the fact no forward was in sight of the play and blame the goalie.

And for the coup de grace, after everyone couldn’t wait to make a big deal about Patrik Elias’s spinorama last night which was in fact a lucky shot with horrendous goaltending by Evgeni Nabokov, the Devils saw an ‘actual’ highlight reel goal tonight with Alex Ovechkin making Jon Merrill’s jock dissapear on the ice and also deking around our supposed best defensive forward in Travis Zajac, then making Cory look silly with the finish.  After that goal I did something I never do…I left early.  Usually a team’s either inept or noncompetitive, tonight the Devils managed to be both at the same time.  Even before Ovechkin’s goal the Devils showed little fight and indeed wound up the third period with a mere four shots on goal, with their season on the line now eight points out of the top three in the Metro and six points out of the last playoff spot (with Florida having four games in hand).  If the Devils were going to give off the mere illusion of a playoff run they had to win tonight and Tuesday before the break to get some momentum and make up some ground.  Instead they lost more ground to a Caps team that’s beaten us like a drum three times and the one game we did manage to win was one of Cory’s better efforts of the season and Braden Holtby giving us a third-period goal.

With the Devils now 12-17-6 and more than half the season to play, realistically the hunt for a playoff spot is over.  Before Christmas.  One might ask what the point is in firing Pete DeBoer now if the season’s truly over anyway, but now it’s not about getting results for this year as much as it is playing players that should be playing in a lost cause of a season instead of the Peter Harrolds and Tim Sestitos of the world and ridding the locker room of the culture of ‘we tried hard’ where even Elias was getting snippy about the crowd booing a 2-0 loss to Ottawa on Wednesday cause the effort was there.  Well whoopdie freaking doo, you want a gold star?  This organization’s still won 65 of its last 200 games, it was a cumulative boo for some bad efforts this season and a lot of bad play.  Would the optics have been better if the booing was say, tonight?  (and there was plenty of booing that I heard and partook in).  I was going to opine about the fans booing the final three minutes Wednesday but I’ll just leave it at this…if nobody this side of Michael Ryder and Damien Brunner’s going to be held accountable for three bad years by anyone in the organization then it’s up to the fans to voice their displeasure with losing since clearly it’s not forthcoming from upstairs or the bench.  GM Lou Lamoriello’s ‘I have thoughts but will not share them right now’ (paraphrase) was less than convincing.  Nobody cares about thoughts anyway, can we see some action?  From the same organization that fired Claude Julien and Robbie Ftorek in 100-point seasons the silence vis-a-vis Pete DeBoer is deafening.