While I did not stay up late on a weeknight for the sour end of the Devils’ road trip (a 6-3 defeat in Colorado), there was no getting away from Friday’s home game against the Caps – even though I did have a bad feeling about the game all day. Mostly because it seemed obvious the Devils haven’t quite learned the lesson that they can’t play the same way without their two star centers that they play with them, and to be honest they weren’t even playing all that well at even strength when Jack Hughes and Nico Hischier were in the lineup anyway. When my co-worker asked whether I was going to the game he could sense my angst when I grunted yeah…unfortunately the game pretty well confirmed my negativity before faceoff as the Devils once again came a cropper against a Caps team partying like it’s 2018.

To be fair, even I didn’t think the game would get out of hand in the first period AGAIN after our previous home game against the Caps was 3-0 before you could blink with Akira Schmid getting pulled after the first intermission. This time it was Vitek Vanecek starting, and he didn’t even last for the whole first period after two brutal goals allowed in a fifteen second span. Which of course is problem number one for the Devils right now – goaltending.

When both your goalies have a GAA above 3 and a save percentage below .900 then you have issues, unless you time transported back to the 1980’s when there was no defense and shots routinely went in from off the boards. While Schmid started the season poorly in his first two games, he was at least trending up after a good performance in St. Louis while Vitek has been trending down – even given the fact you couldn’t actually blame him for much in Colorado when we got pumped for three unanswered goals in the third period. It should have been a sign that game was going to crap when Miles Wood of all people scored a shorthanded breakaway though.

Still, with the schedule the way it was Schmid would have sat for almost two weeks after the Blues game if he hadn’t played last night – what happened to the so-called 50-50 split it was proported to be early? And why are we so quick to lose confidence in Schmid but then just run Vitek into the ground when he isn’t even playing well? That leads to problem number two right now – coaching. Lindy Ruff, like all old-school coaches is automatically going to default to playing vets when the crap hits the fan. Which manifests itself in overplaying Vitek, or even more maddeningly underplaying recent top ten pick Alex Holtz. You would have hoped this wouldn’t be as much of an issue this year now that the coach has a little more job security (not to mention the team’s good start thanks to their all-world PP), but clearly it will always be an issue with an old-school coach.

What’s going on with Holtz is mind-numbing though….you’re down your top two centers needing offense down two goals middle of the first and three goals by the middle of the second, and you play him seven minutes?! And it’s not like he was playing poorly, he created a couple of good scoring chances but oh no we can’t have that, he needs to hold onto the puck more (yes this was the actual explanation when the coach was pressed on why Holtz was benched for the likes of Curtis Lazar in the third period)! Like Jesper Bratt in the third period when a great scoring chance died on his stick? That’s just indicative of the organization’s larger issue with Holtz going on two years now, if you don’t believe in him then he should have already been traded. If you do then he should be playing, especially now when you need other sources of offense! This isn’t 1985 where you can just play guys five minutes a night till they’re 23, you have cap and free agency concerns now.

It’s not like the goalie and coach are the only concerns right now either…although I guess you can sort of blame concern number three on the coaching too, which is this team’s continued penchant for only giving effort some of the time in games. Sure, Vitek gave up two crappy goals in the first period last night but there’s no excuse to basically quit for the next thirty-five minutes after that! And only down 2-0 at the time, with Schmid stopping every puck except the one where we gave up a two-on zero with Timo Meier and Brendan Smith (who continues to think he’s Bobby Orr) both pinching forward, and Kevin Bahl not seeing that and trying a desperate shot which was blocked, leading to the almost automatic goal breakaway.

Sadly, that goal wound up hanging last night’s loss on Schmid which is about as dubious as it gets considering Schmid stopped the other twenty shots on net last night which weren’t two-on-zero breakaways. Nor could he do anything about Kuznetsov’s seeing-eye empty-netter late, which was a fitting end to the game. Or so I thought before Tom Wilson went after Timo, who’d legally checked Rasmus Sandin earlier in the period, and he pretended he was badly hurt (after looking around to see if there was a whistle) for long enough to stop the play and get carried off, only to return heroically for the next shift. I was walking out after the empty-net goal and saw the brouhaha immediately figured we were engaging in sore loser crap until I realized to my disbelief we were the ones on a power play.

Of course, nothing came of that which in itself was a fitting end to the night. In the end, we got too little, too late from our underachieving forwards. For all the talk about Jack and Nico missing, you should still be able to find offense from the likes of Bratt, Timo, Dawson Mercer and Tyler Toffoli up front and Dougie Hamilton plus Luke Hughes in the back. Not all these players are underachieving but too many have been MIA without our big guns. Timo reminds me of the Ilya Kovalsuck days in 2009 where yeah you’re seemingly getting enough points for his defenders to point to (a lot of assists on Jack goals accounting for a good chunk of Timo’s ten points) but you’re not exactly getting the dominant player we paid through the nose for. With four goals and a -11 in thirteen games, his numbers are actually comparable to Fabian Zetterlund who has four goals and a -10 in fourteen games for the Sharks. As much as I like Zetterlund and wish we could have kept him, that’s not exactly the company you want your star winger to be keeping.

It’s difficult to get on Bratt because of his start to the season, but you’d like to see better than one assist in his last four games, or one shot on goal in his last two. Bratt is really the guy who should be carrying the offense right now, or at least facilitating everyone else to make it go. Mercer in some ways has been the most disappointing of all throughout the season with one goal and zero assists in his first twelve plus games before finally getting a second goal in the third period last night…yippidee doo dah. And when talking about disappointments up front, let’s not let Ondrej Palat slide. He has a mere four assists with a -7 to go along with a big fat goose egg in the goal column so far this year. I know some of us joked that his Game 7 shift paid for his whole contract last year, but I don’t want that to literally be his only highlight as a Devil barely a year into a five-year deal and he’s also one of the guys you should be counting on to not let the effort continually sag time and again.

I haven’t even touched on the defense yet, which at times has its own issues. They’ve actually been fortunate in that their top six have remained healthy to this point but that doesn’t mean everyone who’s currently in the top six needs to stay there. I don’t think GM Tom Fitzgerald is willing to stand pat on the D either, judging by the rumors of them being in on disgruntled Flames d-man Nikita Zadorov.

Clearly the D was going to have growing pains with younger players in Luke and Bahl taking regular shifts this year but you’re also not counting on having to play Brendan Orr every game, or stupid decisions by the forwards leaving the D even more exposed than they need to be – exhibit A the aforementioned Kuznetsov goal. You’d also like to see better five-on-five play in general from this group and it’s been a problem since the start of the season – Jack and Nico or no Jack and Nico.

Yes we’re still ‘fine’ at 7-5-1 and Jack will probably be back in a couple of weeks, and no we’re not at any kind of DEFCON 1 level yet – but sooner or later the team needs to pick it up before their five-on-five and goaltending issues come back to bite them and they spiral downhill, putting a playoff spot in sudden peril. Which would not be acceptable by any metric. At least hopefully the message has finally sunk in that you can’t play like the freaking ’80’s Oilers without two of your main cogs.

My only question is, what took you so long coach? I could have told you this weeks ago and I don’t have 1500 games or whatever it is of NHL experience!