I had to look back and see when my last blog on the Devils was, turns out it was when we hit another valley losing the first three games of our pre and post-holiday homestand. Since then, the Devils have won five of six games, actually looking impressive in a couple of them – road blowouts of the Senators and Capitals. I’m certainly not going to make the case everything is hunky dory again though, particularly at home where everything remains a slog. 

Sure, they managed to beat Detroit right before Christmas to stop the skid before visions of a winless homestand percolated through the holiday but it was a Detroit team that was on a travel back-to-back (we know plenty about that!) and had lost one of its defensemen during the game, probably the biggest reasons we were able to come from behind in the third period to win 3-2 after a sloggish first two periods. At least Timo Meier looked right again for the first time all season, scoring two goals and seemingly finding his first step. He looked to be fully recovered from his lower-body injury at last, following that pre-holiday display up by scoring the OT winner against the Blue Jackets in the first game after Christmas…of course, then he suffered a ‘middle body’ injury a couple days later in Boston and is now out of the lineup again with an undetermined return date. Oh, and Ondrej Palat has also been out of the lineup the last few days, also with no return date…just to pile on more of an annoyance. So goes the 2022-23 season.

The aforementioned game against Columbus was yet another slog against a bad team at home. At least they managed not to lose to the last-place Blue Jackets this time, barely with Luke Hughes inarguably taking a lot of people off the griddle with his brilliant end-to-end rush late in the third period to save the Devils just when they were set to go down to defeat again down 3-2 with the net empty.

Even with that dramatic finish and Timo’s OT winner, this Devils team just leaves you unsatisfied on the whole, particularly with the play being even more skittish at home. It shouldn’t have even had to come down to that with a rested team, but the woes against bad teams at home and our goaltending woes are both seemingly coming to a head the last couple weeks. I was at that game barely a week ago and I can barely remember anything from it at this point to be honest, aside from Damon Severson getting a nice ovation from the crowd in his first game back at the Rock. This whole season has been a bit of a blur…bad start? Yeah, that usually happens at home. Bad game against a bad team? Yeah, that usually happens too. Crappy goals allowed? Almost a nightly occurrence. Do we win? Sometimes the talent takes over (usually on the road), sometimes it disappears (usually at home).

In fact, that Blue Jackets game did see a slight changing of the guard in net with Nico Daws taking the #2 spot for Akira Schmid…you knew what was coming next at that point, with Schmid being sent down after the Blue Jackets game. It’s hard to say he really did anything to deserve staying up with a 3.26 GAA and .893 save percentage – and his numbers haven’t been much better in three starts back at Utica so far – but inarguably those are still better stats than starter Vitek Vanecek’s. And it felt at times Schmid never got a fair chance, starting with being pulled twice midway through the first period (once his play merited it, once it didn’t) while Vitek almost never gets that treatment no matter how bad he stinks. Age and waiver priority played into Schmid being sent down as well, and even during the summer GM Tom Fitzgerald publicly stated his wish that he could get another goalie so Schmid would be in Utica to improve our depth. It seemed a funny thing to say then in the wake of his impressive playoff series against the Rangers and Game 5 against the Hurricanes, but not so weird in hindsight.

Of course, it’s not ideal to have Daws take a full load of starts barely a week or two after returning from major surgery but if they’re going to play more games like the road pastings in Ottawa and Washington, it might not even matter much. Daws played both and was at least okay-ish or better, which is an improvement from the goaltending we’ve had most of the season but almost any goalie, even ours should win games you get six goals in (exhibit A, Game 3 against the Canes last year when we scored eight and won comfortably – despite a poor Vitek game coughing up four of his own). And lo and behold, he actually stopped a breakaway in the latter game which has usually been a 100% goal against this year:

Vitek on the other hand…things just are not getting better for this dude. It’s easy to say the playoff meltdown broke Vitek, but really his stretch last year wasn’t all that impressive. His first fifty or so games are what made his season to be honest. Even as the team’s started inducing wins with intense labor pains, Vitek just keeps giving up mind-bogglingly bad goals by the game. In Boston on a back-to-back the Devils actually had a good start, getting out to a 2-0 lead but Vitek coughed up four goals in rapid-fire succession in the second period, with the last three coming in a four and a half-minute span. It wasn’t quite as bad as the Edmonton game where he gave up three in less than seventy seconds, but you really just can’t have periods like this where the bleeding doesn’t get stopped. This is where the ‘just make a save’ crowd has a point. 

I’ve always been one to not want to scapegoat the goalie for every little thing but I was on my last nerve with Vitek yesterday, especially with how emotional that game got. Predictably, the emotions got ramped up after a legal hit on Connor Bedard by Brendan Smith that got timed just right and unfortunately, took the rookie phenom out for the rest of the night. I lost any sympathy I might have had for the Blackhawks once they started predictably throwing cheap shots as a result, including one on Nico Hischier that took him out for the rest of the first period as he had to go get examined. Thankfully, it seems as if symptoms were nonexistent as he came back in the second period and played the rest of the night.

Yet it seemed like the refs were more willing to call penalties for us immediately after the Bedard hit, basically canceling out the double minor Nick Foligno took for going after Smith by giving him a minor as well, then calling back-to-back penalties on Jonas Siegenthaler and Colin Miller while the hit on Nico went unpunished. To their credit I think the refs decided early in the second period enough was enough as far as the Hawks getting a pound of flesh, especially after a sequence that saw Dawson Mercer and Ryan Donato get matching minors while Alex Vlasic took a game misconduct and an instigator on Nathan Bastian as a response to a boarding penalty from the latter. Then right after the next whistle, Nick Foligno took on Smith in the inevitable post-Bedard fight, especially once he got ruled out for the night. Ironically Foligno would later leave the game himself due to injury, putting the Hawks down a full forward line with Vlasic’s expulsion.

This is where the old joke ‘I came to a fight and a hockey game broke out’ really fits. Not that it was a great game by any stretch, in fact it was another frustrating one against a team with four road wins all year and without its phenom for much of this game. Our big-name players seem to like piling up stats in the odd game (re: the Senators and Capitals road blowouts), but they’ve been MIA in too many other games the last few weeks. To Jesper Bratt’s credit, at least he tried to put shots on net with a jaw-dropping nine…but none were even close to going in. It was that kind of night for over forty-five minutes, with our only goal by then coming midway through the second on a brilliant give-and-go executed by Simon Nemec and Alexander Holtz, with the latter scoring his ninth goal of the season in spite of some seemingly over the top ‘tough love’ from the head coach at times in terms of icetime this season.

If Holtz’s icetime has been the subject of debate among the fanbase for the last two years, there’s never been any concern about Nemec getting a fair shot. He got twenty minutes a night from his first game in December on, none of the typical ‘ramp up from the third pairing’ you’d typically expect from a nineteen-year old rookie. Makes you think that the decision to send him down after camp didn’t come from the coaching staff, since they already trusted him this much the minute he arrived in the wake of Dougie Hamilton’s injury. And he’s done nothing to un-earn that trust, playing with a poise and efficiency that belies his lack of experience at the NHL level. Nemec even pushed fellow rookie Luke into the background as the best player on the ice last night by far. More on that later though.

It did look like that Holtz goal was just going to be a blip of happiness in another dreary loss to a cream of the crap team. Jason Dickinson scoring a power play goal in the first period on a meh shot where the screen had already passed by Vitek was bad enough in the first period, but scrubini Boris Katchouk’s shorthanded wrister late in the second period (also unscreened) was a dagger that completely sucked the life out of the team and the arena. And Katchouk was all the more happy to revel in it, mocking Holtz’s goal celebration where he egged the crowd on for more noise by cupping his ears to mock the lack of it. A punk move to be sure, and by a third-pairing defenseman no less – but I’d expect nothing more from the Blackhawks organization.

Even then when texting my friend he wanted to blame the goaltending, I was like well, we’ve also only scored one goal in two periods against a crap team and likely would be on pins and needles waiting to blow the game even with a competent goalie stopping both. But by that point, if Vitek was even the slightest bit of a jerk or blase I might have tried to start a Fire Vitek chant after he gave up his second clunker of the night and about his hundredth on the season. That’s what makes this particularly tough, he isn’t…he isn’t Brian Rolston or Jamie Langenbrunner late in his career just giving off an ‘I don’t give a bleep’ vibe. He’s never blamed anyone but himself for his struggles and his play for most of last year inarguably helped us to our best regular season in franchise history. 

Not to mention the double annoyance that…we really don’t have another option at this point. Schmid’s been almost as bad, while Daws is at least seemingly getting a chance to win the starting job you can’t really count on it at this point long-term, and the goalie trade market is just stupid because there aren’t enough good ones to go around, so even the meh ones are getting marked up right now. And to be honest, I get just as frustrated with the underachieving skaters that I do with the underperforming goalies but the latter gets a disproportionate amount of the blame so I wind up pushing back against the skaters more. To be fair, I don’t think we were even that bad in anything but finishing last night for most of the first forty minutes…well that and a suddenly impotent power play which went 0-6 last night (really -1 for 6 given the shorthanded goal), has run out of ideas and misses Dougie for sure.

Still, it looked like everyone had given up at 2-1 from fans to players alike. Maybe if Nemec’s seemingly nothing shot didn’t go in almost six minutes into the third it would have been the dreary loss I’m sure most of us were expecting at that point. It’s nice to actually be the beneficiary of bad goaltending on the other end for once, though to be fair if anyone deserved that break it was Nemec who just continues to make you pinch yourself. Between him and Luke, the Devils should be well-set on D for the next decade, even given our issues with the vets at times this year. 

His goal roared the team and crowd back to life, then the Holtz and Mike McLeod connection struck again late in the third to give the Devils their first lead of the night after Holtz gained the zone and got the puck to Curtis Lazar, whose shot was deflected home by a suddenly lively McLeod. Holtz and McLeod being first-line quality at any point in 2024 I didn’t have on my bingo card, especially McLeod who scored a grand total of four goals in 80 regular season games last year and looked to be just another first-round pick who turned into a fourth-line grinder. Maybe that Game 7 goal against Henrik Lundqvist Igor Shesterkin really did turn something on in this guy. It’s certainly a nice salary drive for him going into another RFA year, hah.

Shockingly, Vitek held up in the third period – even making a brilliant split-second decision to come out of the net and skate almost to the center line to prevent a breakaway chance. And for twenty minutes I didn’t have to worry about helping run this poor guy out of New Jersey. Katchouk hopefully started eating crow for his mocking nonsense the minute Tyler Toffoli scored the clinching empty-netter. How dare you as a third-pairing defenseman on a bad team mock ANYone else’s crowd? Especially taking offense to Holtz pumping up his own crowd.

Of course, the Devils being the Devils they couldn’t even escape an otherwise drama-free end of the game without drama as Jack Hughes seemingly hurt his wrist and missed the last few minutes of the game. Another injury to worry about, yay. While Jack hasn’t even been playing that well as of late, we really can’t afford to be down three top six forwards. Even with the Devils’ improved record since early December other teams keep winning too, we aren’t off the bubble yet and things still need to get a lot better before we start planning for April hockey again.