It’s been a while since I did write any form of a recap, for a reason. I just didn’t watch much of the team on the West Coast so I would have felt silly doing recaps of games I just followed from afar. Admittedly the team’s uneven start to the season including the Sharks meltdown a couple weeks ago (which, granted seems to not actually be as bad a loss now that they’ve won six of nine!) really turned me heavily skeptical. For the first twenty-seven games of the season the Devils have largely shown all the classic signs of an underachiever – they’ve been inconsistent all year in terms of both effort and efficiency, with several big-name players having down seasons, and at times only held above water because of their power play and Jack Hughes.

I admit even after last night’s stirring 2-1 OT win against the Bruins, I still don’t know what to think of this Devils team – having already been burned thinking the Islander third-period comeback a couple weeks ago was a sign this team had snapped out of their early season malaise, only for them to fall right back into it with uneven performances against the Flyers and Canucks sandwiching that disaster against the Sharks. Sure, they’d largely played better on the road (not all that surprising given how they seem to thrive more away from the tense sellout crowds here – and another secret source of my angst) during their four-game West Coast swing, even after blowing a 5-2 lead in the first game of the trip at Vancouver in the Hughes brothers bowl, only to have Jesper Bratt rescue the two points at the tail end of regulation. 

It seems as if the pond hockey this team’s tried to play for much of the season at least thankfully went missing in their next two West games, taut 2-1 and 4-2 wins over Seattle and Calgary. Losing on a back-to-back against a now-hot Edmonton team at the end of the trip was somewhat expected, yet annoying at the same time cause once again Akira Schmid had a poor game (just like against the Sharks) when he had a chance to keep the starter’s job for at least a week or so. So of course, it was back to Vitek Vanecek against the Bruins last night – though at least he had played better in Calgary than when he helped blow the huge lead against the Canucks.

I’ve said I’m tired of talking about the goaltending even though I’ve taken great pains to try and not dwell on it over and over again, in large part because I feel that the goalies’ poor play has become an excuse for the rest of the team’s poor efforts. Last night in the first period, the Devils showed all the classic symptoms of underachiever syndrome – poor start to the game, poor net front coverage on Morgan Geekie’s first-period goal, and a dreadful rebound left by Vitek on said goal.

Needless to say, I was not amused walking around the intermission after the first period. Or even after the second, where the Devils stabilized the game a bit but still trailed by that same 1-0 score against a Bruins team missing key players Pavel Zacha (yes, really!) and Charlie McAvoy.  Admittedly, the fact I’d only been at three home wins going into last night – out of eight attended – with two of them being against Buffalo and the other on Opening Night two months ago, I’m more inclined to think the worst is going to happen at home than when it’s 12:30 EST time out West, though ironically I did go to sleep at 5-2 of the Vancouver game only to find out we had to scramble just to win the game at the end of regulation.

Heck, you probably do think the Devils lost judging by the tone of my article but believe me, the tone would have been much worse had they died a slow death in the third period. To be fair things haven’t all been bad in Newark – even an injury to Dougie Hamilton gave Simon Nemec a chance to win a job at the NHL level and he’s basically passed every test with flying colors, playing over twenty minutes a night in his first six NHL games during all situations. Makes you think perhaps Fitz and the higher ups are the ones who kept Nemec down after camp rather than the staff since it doesn’t seem like he’s had to do much to earn their trust already. Does any team in the sport have a pair of ridiculously young defensemen this talented the way we do with Nemec and Luke Hughes?

While the Devils did play better in the second period than in the first, you could see and feel the difference the way they came out for the third – from the first shift until Dawson Mercer tied the game at 2:34. It was the kind goal you need to have happen against a team with as good a defense and goaltending as Boston – crash the net, get rebounds. Sounds simpler than it is but honestly we weren’t going to the dirty areas enough in the first two periods. Some good work by Alexander Holtz and the returning (from injury) Erik Haula contributed to Mercer’s seventh of the season.

I might add that for the people complaining that the goalies haven’t made enough saves to keep us in the game while we start poorly, Vitek did actually have a couple of those type of saves in the last forty plus minutes of last night’s game, specifically on a dangerous David Pastrnak mini-breakaway (with a little help from a backchecking Nemec) late in the second which kept the game within one, and also making three rapid-fire saves in a row during a third period sequence that kept the game tied. If you’d told me after the first period that Vitek would get second star of the night, I would have found that just as unlikely as Zach Wilson winning AFC player of the week for my football Jets, but I digress.

Once we were able to grind the game to overtime I did think we had a good chance of winning the three-on-three, cause we do about as well in that format as we do poorly in the shootouts. Even with Jack not exactly having his best game – he looked like rookie Jack, turnovers all the place, weak shots…until the last shot of the game at least. But that’s what superstars can do, even when not playing well it just takes one moment to do THIS

Amazingly, with that win the Devils have now won seven of nine in spite of their obvious issues…of course, this was always supposed to be the month we were supposed to make hay with our schedule, but at least they’re finding a way to do that and stay in the middle of a brutally tough Eastern playoff race. If we can just get this Devils team for the rest of the season, maybe we’ll have the season we were supposed to have after all – make the playoffs comfortably and give a good account of ourselves there. One game at a time though…and on Saturday it’s time to make amends for one of our worst losses of the season, this time going to Columbus to take on a Blue Jackets team we no-showed for throughout the first two periods of a 2-1 defeat three weeks ago.