As the Devils’ season crashes and burns, are we seeing the final days of Jaromir Jagr in NJ? (TSN.ca)

Fifteen more days.  That’s how long Devil fans have to wait until the NHL trade deadline when hopefully perhaps Lou Lamoriello will start recouping assets (re: picks) to start rebuilding from the trainwreck that is the 2014-15 season.  Of course as of a few days ago Lou was still giving no indication he’d be willing to move anyone and still apparently coaching as if he’s trying to coax a miracle run into the playoffs – latest evidence being Cory Schneider starting both ends of a road back-to-back in Chicago and Nashville.  Right now the Devils are still a full twelve points out of the second wild card spot with Boston having a game in hand and four other teams in between the Devils and Boston, if you want to fool yourself into thinking there’s a chance.  For there to be a chance, the Devils would have to get around 22 wins in their last 26 games.  If you’ve watched even one Devils game over the last month you know that’s just not happening.  If it wasn’t for the presence of Schneider, it quite honestly wouldn’t shock me if the Devils lost 22 of their last 26 games and anyone that watches this team bloody well knows that.

Granted you can say Lou has to put on a public front till the deadline but some of their decisions right now are just scaring me.  If they are going to sell off assets at the deadline they’re sure picking a weird way to go about it, given the way they’ve dramatically cut Jaromir Jagr’s icetime in recent weeks (including on the PP) in favor of offensive powerhouses like Jordin Tootoo and Steve Bernier.  Jagr recently gave the indication that if he’s going to play limited icetime he might as well get traded, or something to that effect and really I can’t blame him.  Scratching Michael Ryder in a number of recent games certainly didn’t help what little value he might have left, especially when he got scratched when the Bruins supposedly had scouts at the Rock to watch him.

They clearly don’t think Eric Gelinas is a big part of their future anymore given the way he’s played and the way he’s been marginalized even when he’s been in the lineup – having his own PP time cut drastically this year.  If they are going to eventually trade him though, scratching him several straight games then throwing him back in there on the road against tough opposition in Chicago and Nashville is not exactly the way to build back up his stock.  It’s more like you’re trying to make the kid fail.  And I get he’s been bad and I get at this point he looks more like Derek buddy Michael Del Zotto or fellow former Devil Kurtis Foster than a player that can be an everyday defenseman, but this team is out of the race anyway…what’s the point of playing retreads like Mark Fraser or Peter Harrold?  Clearly they don’t help the defense much either given the rising shot totals game after game.

It’s not even just those decisions that’s led me to calling the coaching staff The Three Stooges but just the day-in day-out things that if this were another organization they’d literally be accused of tanking.  Putting goal-scoring winger extrordinare – the only one on this team – Mike Cammalleri as a third-line center.  Having Tootoo on the power play at the expense of Jagr and Adam Henrique, who granted has been a giant dissapointment himself the last few months.  Throwing backup Keith Kinkaid to the wolves in Montreal last weekend on the rear end of a back-to-back (with Toronto at home on the front end of it) while giving Schneider the easy home game, then giving Schneider both ends of the road back-to-back this weekend.  Playing a regressive system where you’re routinely getting outshot by 15-20 per game.  Honestly for all of former coach Pete DeBoer’s issues, he looks like a mensa member compared to this group of Hall of Famers that all look like utter bafoons with the product they roll out on the ice night in and night out.

Obviously some blame has to go onto the players themselves too, they clearly were quitting on DeBoer and they’ve gone through the motions even with the GM behind the bench far too often the last few weeks which is frightening enough.  Many of them won’t be here after next year or shouldn’t be here after this year anyway, so that could be a part of the problem.  I get the Devils are a bad team and have zero chance at the playoffs but come on…you’re still professional athletes with a lot of games remaning this season.  You have to do better than getting outshot 21-3 in the first period last night in Nashville!  Or losing a home game to EDMONTON, where you get dominated in the last two periods!  Not to mention any number of other dead man walking performances in the last several weeks – against good and bad teams alike.

Maybe the 2011 run with Jacques Lemaire behind the bench skewed my expectation level over what to look for in the second half of a lost season but I’ll say this, Lemaire wouldn’t have tolerated this garbage the way DeBoer did, or the way the current staff including Lou has.  This is partly where I think this organization is insulting fans’ intelligence a bit.  When you have Lou last night in front of the media saying ‘well if we just gave this kind of an effort all season we wouldn’t be losing’.  Really?  The kind of effort that leads you to being outshot 21-3 in a period?!  I get the last two periods didn’t completely stink, which is shocking in itself – not that I watched most of last night’s debacle, but still are we going to just ignore the fact the first period happened at all?  Or Monday in the Oilers debacle when Lou came close to calling out the team for a bad second period, but then said the effort was ‘better’ in the third.  Really?  You had FIVE SHOTS ON GOAL!  Against Edmonton, in a period where you were trying to come from behind.  Did the Oilers suddenly die and become the ’76 Canadiens with Larry Robinson and Serge Savard patrolling the blueline?  Come on, Lou.

It’s not just hockey ops that’s feeding into fallacies these days, the MSG broadcast from what I’ve heard this season has been atrocious.  I say from what I’ve heard pretty loosely, since I haven’t actually watched a road game all the way through since the Ranger game at MSG just after the coaching change, and most of the home games I go to so thankfully I’ve been away from the deteriorating broadcast this season (funny how the broadcast has mirrored the team itself, a former standard-bearer becoming a laughinstock).  I get you’re trying to sell a product and you want people to actually watch the last twenty-five games but to continually update ‘the playoff race’ or act like this team has a chance at the postseason is just silly.  Steve Cangialosi’s assertion last night that the Devils probably needed to sweep the homestand to have a chance was even laughable.  A chance at what?  They’re nine hundred points out, behind five teams and haven’t had more than a three-game winning streak in two years!  Most of the casual fans who would buy your bs turned the product off long ago because it’s so god-awful and most of the diehard dopes that are still watching just roll their eyes.

It seems as if ownership and the ticket department is also in denial, sending out next season’s invoices – many of them with raises of like 20% from last year.  Now I get Devil sth ticket prices are still enviable compared to MSG or the new arena in Brooklyn next year with an Islanders team people actually want to watch, but it’s just the optics of raising prices to such an extent after a third straight playoff-less season that are all wrong and show how out of touch ownership is.  My tickets this year were $27 a game.  Next year they’ll be around $32.50 per game (including a 7% Newark tax which had been included in the ticket cost every year in the past, whereas now it’s a further add on along with the $3 increase I already got on just the flat ticket price).  When I first became a sth in 120 during the ’11-12 season my tickets were $22.  So essentially I’ve already had a 50% increase in the space of four seasons and the Devils really have to watch it considering the upper bowl used to be a ghost town when sth’s were priced in the high $30’s there before the big slash happened after our first playoff-less season in the last few years.  I haven’t renewed yet but probably will at some point simply because of three words – location, location, location.  Sitting behind the net on the aisle in the 100’s is among the best seats in the building, even if I don’t always like some of the dopes around me.  Not to mention the tenure benefits in terms of rewards and access to player events aren’t insignificant and if I wasn’t mad at just about everyone and anyone associated with the team right now I’d show my appreciation for that part of it at least.

Now if I wasn’t sitting on the aisle right smack behind the net in what’s still one of the cheaper sections?  It’d probably be a different story in terms of renewal.  Cause let’s face it, you can get cheaper tickets on a night-in and night-out basis on the secondary market, especially while the team continues to lose.  Not only is it easier to find cheaper tickets on the secondary market, but it’s also harder to sell them – which is a bit of a juxtaposition – but this year the Devils put a codicil on your season tickets that if you sold more than half they had the right to take action including disabling barcodes.  Next season that codicil becomes even more onerous saying if you sell more than five games you could have tickets disabled with no refund…with the caveat (according to one sth rep) that this doesn’t apply to TicketExchange sales.  Only to other secondary market online sites like StubHub which the team doesn’t profit from.  Apparently the Devils do spend ‘significant’ resources tracking online sites to see what tickets sell but I don’t really know how they can track StubHub sales – aside from digital tickets – now that StubHub lets you leave the seat numbers off your tickets.

I get wanting to protect the value of season tickets, but how exactly does it help protecting the value if you’re going to restrict it to such an extent or put the squeeze on secondary market sales?  Especially when on your own market (TicketExchange) the floor you can sell a pair for is something like $55 – including the hidden costs which only show up when you’re purchasing tickets – but you only clear around $35 from it.  For games like Tuesday against the Sabres that floor’s just not realistic, no matter how much you try to artificially influence the market people will always find other underground methods of buying and selling tickets, or worse not be able to and eventually realize just how much money they wind up eating by not selling tickets.  Especially when it’s above the floor you yourself price these games at – the Sabres game for me has a ‘sth cost’ of $15 per ticket.  Plus let’s face it, there isn’t exactly a waiting list for Devils tickets.  Maybe you could pull off this crap at MSG where you could always comp a celebrity to fill empty seats and sell out every game, but when you have a limited fanbase you can’t do things like raise tickets and then tell people what they can and can’t do with their tickets.

Even given all that, let’s face it – I still like going to games (as bad as the product’s been this year), I still like all the other add-ons sth’s get, and I still foolishly believe this team can turn around sooner rather than later IF Lou returns to reality and starts improving the forward core during the draft and planning for next year at the deadline instead of feeding into the fools’ gold of chasing a playoff berth they’ll never get.