Although we’re already two days into the NHL schedule, tonight is the official beginning of the season if you’re a Devils fan. To this point I’ve been detached and somewhat derelict in my duty as a fan to eat up all the hype around this year’s team. Part of the reason being I wasn’t around for any of the home preseason games, and barely watched a few minutes of any of them. It wasn’t entirely intentional but make no mistake, this was actually a preseason where there were very few questions about this team to begin with, and it was almost entirely about the main players getting game legs, new players getting used to the team and younger players like Alexander Holtz getting top line shifts to try and facilitate a long-awaited breakout season. All great things for the staff, lousy for fan entertainment although there should be no shortage of the latter when it counts, starting tonight.

I even said in my previous blog there were (barring injury) twenty-two definites on a twenty-three man roster and I was right…all twenty-two players I named were part of the Devils’ opening twenty-three and I’m not an insider or an expert on anything, aside from my own team perhaps. Who was the twenty-third, you ask? Journeyman Chris Tierney, who won a spot on the Opening Night roster and whom I’ve seldom heard of despite the fact he actually has played close to 600 NHL games. Congrats to him and more depth is always a good thing.

One of the quasi-long term questions I did have as a Devils fan finally got answered when the team announced a multi-year extension for coach Lindy Ruff a couple days ago.

How things change in a year, not just for the Devils and the fans’ outlook on the team but for the coach himself. It was basically a year ago where Lindy was under fire from all quarters, starting with the well-documented episode of fans chanting for his firing during the home opener, questioned by the media after two terrible losses to begin the season and doubted by management, who didn’t commit to him beyond his last contracted season and a team option that was eventually exercised this offseason.

It obviously did not look like Lindy was going to be a long-term coach early last year, but I was always conflicted on the whole Lindy question, mainly because of my regard for him as a coach and a person going back to his Sabres days. If he were a disagreeable sort like say, Brent Sutter (never mind being an actual snake like Joel Quenneville or Mike Babcock) then it would have been a lot easier to join in the chants for his firing. In this day and age where we do have at least two Cup-winning coaches being pariahs for different reasons, it was nice to see one of the genuine good guys in the sport have so much success last year and get rewarded for it, whether it was for my team or not.

Fans can feel however they’re going to feel about the head coach – in large part based on results, as Lindy knows all too well. What matters in the long run is how the players feel about him, and what he gets out of those players on the ice.

Franchise center Jack Hughes was the most vociferous in his support of Lindy publicly after a second straight poor season for the team in 2021-22 and to his credit, not only did 2022-23 prove him right but he did all he could personally to back it up, narrowly missing a 100-point season in a true breakout year for the 2019 #1 overall pick. Put the team success last year to the side for a moment, the fact so many younger players have had breakouts under Lindy – starting with Hughes, captain Nico Hischier and Jesper Bratt – have more than made his tenure (and this recent extension) worth it, whatever happens from here.

I thought about doing a proper season preview but truthfully once Tom Fitzgerald took care of business in late June and early July, we’ve known what this team is going to be (or should be) at least – a more refined version of last year’s team, which did amazing things despite being a work in progress throughout, going through a lot of ‘firsts’ together. I might have said this in a previous blog, but one of the biggest questions about this team is just how they handle the next step – being the hunted who everyone expects big things from as opposed to the dangerous upstart they were last year.

That will be another ‘first’ this team has to go through but Fitzy has done a very good job of making sure this team has enough leadership on paper to be able to handle that transition. From big FA signings like Ondrej Palat and Dougie Hamilton to big trades like John Marino and Timo Meier (which turned into a long-term commitment this offseason) and even filling in the margins with guys like Tomas Nosek and Colin Miller, there are no shortage of voices for the younger guys to listen to in the locker room, starting of course with the head coach himself who’s seen it all and pretty much done it all in his career, except of course for the one biggest thing…winning a Stanley Cup.

Although they’re completely different people – and coaches – it is actually a bit reminiscent of when Pat Burns came here, after it looked like his head coaching career was over. Burns was well-traveled and well-respected, but despite some deep playoff runs (including one Cup Final) with Montreal and Toronto he was out of work for nearly two years after being fired by Boston in 2000, and had never won a championship until his first year here in 2002-03, when Burns did an outstanding job willing the least talented of our three Cup teams to a division title and a seven-game upset over President’s Trophy winner Ottawa in the Conference Finals, before outlasting the Cinderella Ducks in seven games to finish the job.

In Lindy’s case, he also reached a Cup Final early in his career and that ended with a controversial finish – the Brett Hull skate in the crease that clinched the Cup for Dallas in triple OT of Game 6 in 1998. After that, the closest Lindy came to a Cup was 2006, when the Sabres (despite missing most of their key defensemen) took the eventual champion Hurricanes into a tied third period of Game 7 before a delay of game penalty for throwing the puck over the glass – I believe it was the first year of that asinine rule – led to the series-deciding power play goal. Ironic indeed that against the Hurricanes last year, it was yet another delay of game penalty that wound up sealing our series defeat when they took advantage of the power play in OT of Game 5.

After a long tenure in Buffalo and a shorter tenure in Dallas – both where some initial early success eventually gave way to a firing – it kind of looked like his head coaching career was over. He even took an assistant job with the Rangers, which you don’t generally see long-time head coaches do. Fortunately for Lindy (and for us) he still had at least one backer in a high place – former player Fitzgerald, who took over as the Devils GM full time during the COVID bubble period of 2020. While the joint announcement of hiring Fitz full-time and Lindy as the coach was portrayed as a package deal, it’s been clear the last few years that Fitz is a genuine backer of Lindy’s, despite the fact the organization was justifiably slow into offering Lindy another deal after his first two seasons here both led to seventh-place finishes way out of the playoffs.

Anyone reading this knows how the rest of the story panned out last year, up to this point at least. After our disastrous 0-2 start, the young Devils grew up in a hurry with a thirteen-game winning streak in November becoming the impetus for a team that set a franchise record for wins in a season. Chants of ‘Fire Lindy!’ early in the season turned into ‘Sorry, Lindy!’ about halfway through the streak and our resurgence with the coach’s personal arc proved to be one of the true feel-good stories of the year in the NHL.

And when the Devils’ season crested in the first round of the playoffs after a historic comeback over the rival Rangers, the coach called back to earlier comments about having a beer with the fans when he was asked after the series if he had any message for the fans?

‘Time to have that beer!’

Cheers, coach!