Perhaps the only good thing that’s happened in Newark the last couple of weeks is this announcement that franchise icon Sergei Brylin will be placed in the team’s Ring Of Honor, which to date only had one member – original owner John McMullen – but will look to add more favored personnel in the coming years. Brylin is just one of five players in franchise history who played on all three Devils Cup-winning teams, with the other four all having their numbers retired along with Patrik Elias, who played on the latter two champions.

To be fair, all of those other individuals were clearly Hall of Fame level players – except in the case of Ken Daneyko, a very good player who will always be an amazing icon – while Brylin wasn’t close to number retirement worthy. After all, Brylin only had one season of 20+ goals and 50+ points (both in 2000-01)…but make no mistake, he certainly deserves this type of recognition. People talk about glue guys in hockey all the time, you could put a picture of Sergei next to the definition of glue guy and it wouldn’t be out of place.

Brylin was the type of guy who could play any role in any situation and not look out of place. Center, winger, power play, penalty kill – he would do whatever was asked and put in a good shift – and he was universally respected to such a degree that he hasn’t gone anywhere even after his playing career ended (apart from some time in the KHL after his NHL playing career ended), spending some time coaching in the AHL once he finally retired as a player before moving up to the NHL staff. Letting him know in front of the whole team that he’ll be honored before January 20th’s home game against Dallas was a particularly nice touch.

Where the team will be in the standings by then is another matter, as their up-and-down start has clearly hit a valley after losses in five of their last six games, including melting down late in the third period against the Rangers on Saturday with a seven and a half-minute stretch, which turned a 3-2 lead into a 5-3 defeat. After a three-day break they followed that up with a top-to-bottom no-show tonight in Detroit, a 4-0 blanking at the hands of Alex Lyon which was our first shutout against in over a hundred games dating back to the end of 2021-22.

I honestly didn’t know Lyon was even on Detroit, last time I heard of this dude he was on the Panthers. Not that it would have mattered if you even played a pee-wee goalie (or even a Devils goalie) with all the resistance the team put up tonight. Thankfully I didn’t see any part of the game until it was after 4-0 but from what little I did watch later on, it wasn’t pretty. And unlike the game Saturday, which was at least against a team that looks like a Cup contender under a proven winner in Peter Laviolette, tonight’s game was against a Wings team that had lost eight of their last eleven and looked to be crashing down to earth after an early season five-game winning streak. Despite our own slump, they were clearly the more desperate team, a fact coach Lindy Ruff didn’t shy away from in his short and sweet postgame presser.

At least he took responsibility for the team’s no-show, as did Tyler Toffoli who put two of the goals allowed on him. Of course, there was plenty of blame to go around and has been for a long time. I don’t even have any appetite to talk about arguably the biggest problem right now, which is clearly the goaltending, I almost feel like it gets beaten into the ground too much at this point as a mechanism by fans to hide all the other issues around the team, but there’s no denying that both Vitek Vanecek and Akira Schmid have been rubbish this season with nearly identical GAA and save percentages (3.38 and .886 for Vitek, 3.46 and .885 for Akira).

Vitek in particular seems unsalvageable at this point, which is unfortunate but let’s face it – he was bad down the stretch last year, worse in the playoffs and has been dreadful this year. It seems like his first 50 or so games last year was the outlier rather than a new norm. He’s still under contract through next year at a meh amount of money and there aren’t exactly a lot of goalie options out there, but it feels almost like we’re torturing him by continuing to throw him out game after game at this point. Especially since it seems like they’d rather protect Akira by not playing him at all, after some of Tom Fitzgerald’s comments in the offseason all but admitting he’d rather have Akira down in Albany. Despite their numbers being similar, Vitek has started twelve games this year to Schmid’s five and it doesn’t even feel that close after Akira got blistered in his first two starts of the year, they’ve only played him in back-to-back situations since.

Although I would have certainly rather have played Schmid against the Rangers Saturday given how last year’s playoff series went, I was resigned to them sticking with Vitek after one of our few wins during this stretch – typically a get-well game in Pittsburgh. Us beating the Pens no matter what the record is or how well both teams are playing is almost as predictable as losing to teams like the Jets and Capitals come hell or high water. Goaltending is about the one thing I don’t blame the coaching on at this point, although you do wonder if goaltending coach Dave Rogalski might be the first to walk the pike if it’s too soon to talk about canning the head coach following his offseason extension. It’s hard to envision any other actionable change to the goaltending at this point, even returning alum Keith Kinkaid is struggling in the AHL, so he doesn’t look like a viable option at this point.

Of course I don’t want to just fall into the same trap I frequently accuse other people of in just blaming everything on the goaltending. Although to segway here, it would be nice if the coaching actually attempted to (gasp) adjust the system given both the fact we’ve had such shaky goaltending and the fact we’ve had two top forwards out for the last few weeks – first it was Jack Hughes and Nico Hischier, now that Jack’s back, Timo Meier’s missed the last few games with Nico only returning to practice in the last week and…hopefully back in the lineup Friday? You would think with a good chunk of your scoring out and with problems at the back end all year you would tighten things up a little bit but no, we still see the same issues allowing two-on-ones and breakaways galore with the end of the first period in Detroit being the perfect example of everything going to crap:

You can’t even blame Vitek on three of the four goals tonight imo…goal number two was bad, as he somehow lifted his leg off the ice on a backhand chance in close with little chance of Dylan Larkin roofing a shot there but goal number one was on a two-on-one, goal number three was wide open off a rebound and goal number four was a power play goal against our below-average PK, who always seem to have one of their major cogs in the box for the actual penalty kill – this time it was Kevin Bahl, who has regressed a bit since being injured a few games ago. Then again it’s fair to say the whole defense has regressed…or maybe the rest of the league has just figured out how to beat our pond hockey system.

Despite being shutout tonight, the offense is the least of the problems right now behind goaltending, coaching and defense but let’s be fair – the overall offensive numbers have been propped up both by a Hart-worthy start by Jack pre-injury, and an insane power play which has been over 35% for almost a quarter of the season. Taking off our twenty-three power play goals, we only have thirty-six other goals in the first seventeen games of the season. So when you do shut down the power play (or more often, have the refs just not call penalties on you) then it becomes that much tougher to win. Especially with goaltending that leaks one or two bad goals a game and a D that more or less does the same.

Despite the Devils embarrassingly being in seventh place only ahead of the pitiful Blue Jackets, the standings are still bunched up enough where the Devils aren’t in a major bit of trouble…yet. But it could get there pretty quickly, especially if the Devils fail to make hay in their upcoming stretch of games against so-called lesser teams, starting with the Black Friday special against Columbus. A game which I won’t be at, partly cause I’ll likely be getting off work at the time the game starts and partly because there’s another home game against the Sabres (struggling and now without star Tage Thompson for a while) the next night anyway. I’d probably go as far as to say if they don’t sweep the weekend it’s at least DEFCON 2 time in Newark. I don’t want to go full DEFCON 1 yet…but just like the early part of the season set us up for a big year last year, this year the early part of the season could be the downfall in the other direction if the team doesn’t start shaping up soon.