For a change, I’m going to start with the good stuff before I get to the bad – of which there was plenty of last night – and that is the induction of Devils icon Sergei Brylin into the still relatively new Ring of Honor. Brylin is the first Devils player and only the second person after original owner John McMullen to be given this kind of recognition. Others will surely follow down the road – our three Cup-winning coaches, Lou Lamoriello and several other players surely deserve to be honored but for now, Brylin’s a nice first step toward giving some other icons and championship Devils well-deserved recognition.
Particularly since Brylin was the only three-time Cup winner for the Devils who didn’t have his number retired (and has coached in the organization for much of his post-playing career), it’s probably all the more fitting he’s the first player who had this type of ceremony. I’m not going to pretend I was the biggest Brylin fan while he was playing, he never had the most outgoing personality, big offensive stats or the crunching hits of a Scott Stevens but you always had to respect him. While he’s not a foundation piece or a gaudy decoration, he was definitely a glue guy, someone who would do a job on any line and in any position in the lineup. Those type of players are essential to Cup teams, even if they’re not the first guy fans will buy a jersey of, or even the fifth.
It is unfortunate that he last played for the Devils in 2008 so you have a whole generation of fans who maybe casually know him as a coach in Albany/Utica and now here but never really saw him as a player. For someone who’s not all that comfortable in the spotlight, Brylin did more than fine with his speech. Unfortunately, Brylin was the last Devil who did anywhere close to fine on the ice tonight, and now I can get to the evisceration.
Before that though, a personal note – apologies if anyone lurks on this blog waiting for my comments on the Devils, I just haven’t been feeling the urge to even watch this team anywhere close to day in and day out, let alone write a blog on it. From early on this season, I just haven’t had a good feeling about this group. Whether overconfidence set in after last year and a dominant preseason, or bad coaching and goaltending have poisoned the well to a degree where everyone either stinks or just gives effort on an intermittent basis, this just…isn’t a very likeable team right now. You can rightly say two years ago we would have killed to just have a frustrating bubble team, but a lot’s changed since then.
I could make the case they were due for some regression after overachieving last year, but that doesn’t give them license to be total underachievers now. This sort of reminds me of the 2009-10 season where in the first half the Devils were on a 125-point pace with a decent, if not great roster but then cratered in the second half and culminated that by a disgraceful no-show against the Flyers in the first round. Even when everyone was healthy this season – which, granted hasn’t been often – they’ve relied on their talent and individual brilliance too much. I was accused of being alarmist early this year when I pointed out if not for Jack Hughes and a godly power play we’d be terrible. Well, now look at us after Jack wound up on IR and the power play has been defanged by the twin losses of Jack and Dougie Hamilton. A power play that was ’80 Oilers-esque for the first fifteen or twenty games of the season has now reverted back to the dark ages where you don’t even expect to get a good chance, you’re just hoping not to get scored on – whereas on the PK, you’re just hoping not to get scored on every game.
Neither mission was accomplished as a brutal shorthanded goal, a PK goal almost literally before you could blink in the first period (after the first of stiff Cal Foote’s two penalties) and some awful turnovers, lazy defending and impotent finishing all led to a 6-2 rout that wasn’t even as close as that score would indicate. Me and my friends walked out at 6-0 in the third period, and frankly I would have gone sooner if I wasn’t visiting them a few sections over. Although the game was clearly over by then, the last Stars goal was pretty indicative of how the night went for us:
Luke Hughes in particular looked hapless on that play and has not just hit the rookie wall, but crashed into it at full speed. He’s hardly the only one who stunk up the joint tonight with terrible decision making and without any concept of how to play defense though. I don’t even want to waste any time or effort pulling up the power play shift which led to Roope Hintz’s shorthanded goal early in the second period but trust me, it was bad. I don’t even want to see it again, but it involved turnovers from at least the trio of Luke, Jesper Bratt and Nathan Bastian…all on the same shift. Puck sloppiness and lazy defending had the inevitable result of a back-breaking second goal, after the Devils’ punchless offense had already been frustrated by ex-Devil Scott Wedgewood. Hintz made Simon Nemec look particularly bad on this play, though it’s hard to get on the kid too much given the level he’s played at as a 19-year old rookie – plus, the inevitable goal was just the end of a lot of disasters on our ‘power play’.
Maybe after a decent-ish start it was inevitable that the team would turn tail and quit at that point, which they certainly did. For almost two periods, Nico Daws kept the Devils in the game which is a strange thing to say in a game we would eventually lose 6-2. But even Daws could do nothing about the utter breakdowns that led to goals #3 and 4 in the last four minutes of the period, turning the crowd from angst to anger. Three guys went toward Tyler Seguin on the right side of the net, leaving Matt Duchene wide open on the left side for a layup goal #3, this is where the ‘is it the dumb system or dumb players?’ conundrum rears its ugly head. Hintz found himself wide open on the right for goal #4 when everyone else was either on the point or the left side of the net. Too many mistakes to get on any one person in particular, unless you’re Lindy Ruff and have the microscope out for Alexander Holtz…which leads to my first target for this mess of a season, the head coach.
First, on the macro level when you get scored on first 31 times in 44 games, that’s indicative of how this team constantly gets off to slow start after slow start, particularly at home where they’re now 9-11-2, compared to 14-7-1 on the road. Once is an accident, twice is a trend and thirty-plus times in barely half a season is a real problem. There’s only so many times the goalies can take the blame for the rest of the skaters’ inability or unwillingness to play sixty minutes most nights. Clearly, the home-road split is another issue. When you’re this bad with the last line change at home and this good without it, it makes you wonder about things…
Even the games we managed to win at home, we weren’t overly impressive in almost any of them. Eight of our nine home wins were either one-goal games, or a one-goal game that turned into a two-goal margin after a late empty-netter (against the pitiful Blackhawks a couple weeks ago) – and many of them were wild comebacks since again, we usually give up the first goal and start badly in the first period. That’s before we even get to the losses, many of which are either against horrible teams or mediocre junk. When this team misses the playoffs they’ll have nobody but themselves to blame after dropping so many points at home to the dross of the league.
Last in the Metro Columbus? One loss and barely avoided a second after Luke’s coast-to-coast goal of the season, while we thumped them twice in Ohio. Anaheim and San Jose, two of the three worst teams in the league? 5-1 and 6-3 losses at home, respectively. Montreal and their conference worst -36 goal differential? Another desultory loss at home last Wednesday. We single-handedly kept a rancid, aging Capitals team in the playoff hunt by losing twice to them at home early in the season, giving up ten goals in two games to a team that’s averaged less than 2.5 per game. Maybe there’s too much line changing and not enough playing at home. There was certainly a lot of angst in the air even before last night’s game, because let’s be honest we – the season ticket holders and people who come to a lot of games by other means – are tired of this bleep by now. I didn’t even bother watching the Columbus game on Friday where we had a relatively comfortable win. Why bother when I just know they’re going to stink it up every time I am contractually obligated to watch?
On a micro level, my problem with the head coach is both his lack of accountability for 95% of the roster when they screw up, and his over-the-top accountability for Holtz, the former first-round pick. It was one thing when last year Holtz wasn’t playing well and the team had other options, which kept him unconscionably in the scratch box for weeks at a time before he finally had to ask to be sent down to get actual playing time. This year however, he’s pacing for 20+ goals and 40+ points, all despite constantly being stuck on the fourth line for long stretches with anywhere from 10-14 minutes a night. And yet he still can’t get out of the doghouse. Lindy’s combative answer to a perfectly legitimate question about why Holtz only got two shifts in the third period against Montreal after he tied the game with a power play goal was ridiculous.
Not only was it dismissive but to top that off, he went into a mini-dissertation about how some turnover along the boards in the defensive zone during the second period was the reason he played so little in the third. I saw at least ten worse turnovers last night than the one which was being referenced (and it did get posted on Twitter if you want to look it up), none of them by Holtz. Of course it’s like seeing Halley’s Comet when you see a Holtz shift these days, despite having the top five-on-five goal scoring ratio per sixty minutes on the team, at least as of a couple games ago. You would think a guy who had three of our twelve goals in the last five games, despite an average ATOI of about twelve minutes a game would get some chances higher in the lineup to get the offense going. But no, gotta focus on his mistakes with a superpowered microscope while everyone else can litter the ice with mistakes without so much as a rebuke from this head coach.
And yes, I get the whole some guys need tough love premise and Holtz seems to be one of those guys, even GM Tom Fitzgerald put out a public warning after last year saying this was a pivotal offseason for the former first-rounder. At some point though, you have to either give him the same chances you give everyone else on the roster or come down on everyone else with the same intensity, one of the two. You can’t have one level of treatment for one young player and another for the rest of the roster. Especially when said young player can add something more than a plug like Max Willman or Chris Tierney can. You can find guys to be plugs on the fourth line, but potential goalscorers don’t grow on trees. And Holtz is developing into an actual goalscorer, but at this point I think he’s ever going to realize his true potential until either he or the head coach leaves.
As frustrated as the head coach leaves me and other fans – yes, the Fire Lindy chants started to bubble to the surface again last night, though not yet with the same unity they did early last year – I don’t want to let the players skate by without throwing a bunch of grievances their way. The system may be bad and clearly the special teams need worth on both ends, PK and PP but some of that is on the players being dumb too. It’s not like the system really changed from last year when we had 120 points and beat the Rangers in the first round. At some point these players need to be made to take agency for their own underachieving, particularly the stars.
Jack Hughes? Great for the first 1/4 of the season before he was either sulking around for the previous few weeks, or playing injured before injury finally forced him from the lineup. Nico Hischier? Hasn’t been as dynamic as last year, and when you’re the captain you need to take a good chunk of the hit for this team’s continuing inability to respond early in games and play well at home. Timo Meier? Even around the injuries, he certainly hasn’t been as dynamic as he was cracked up to be when we acquired him. Jesper Bratt? Still on over a point-a-game pace and one of the few guys I can actually say gives effort on most nights, but he’s definitely proven a lot easier to shut down lately without Jack around for defenses to focus on (same with Nico, for that matter).
And the offense isn’t even the biggest issue right now, in spite of the underachieving and injuries to guys like Jack and Dougie with Holtz chained to the doghouse. Clearly goaltending remains the biggest issue although Daws had a couple of good games to start with after his post-holiday recall and even Vitek Vanecek was fine by all accounts in Columbus (despite giving up a goal on the first shot faced there, another game where we got scored on first). There’s only so much scapegoating of young and mediocre goalies you can do before the question has to be asked, well then why are we playing the same complicated system with younger goalies and younger defensemen who aren’t used to something as overly complicated as our system is?
It’s also easy to scapegoat the fact we have three rookie or second-year defensemen in the lineup nightly until you realize even the vets like John Marino and Jonas Siegenthaler are both underperforming as well (whereas Nemec has been overperforming expectations, despite goal #2 last night), or maybe they were both just one-year wonders. If that’s the case then Luke and Nemec really both better develop into franchise defensemen. Of course, Luke is already bumping up on a career high in games played in late January. At least Nemec had experience with a pro workload in the AHL last year so he shouldn’t have a rookie wall to get through the way Luke does. Brendan Smith being out due to injury now actually doesn’t help our already sagging PK either, although for as much as he adds on the PK, five-on-five he creates other issues.
So yes, the coaching and goaltending needs to get a lot better, the D needs to be better, the offense needs to be more consistent and at least find a level between early-season god like power play and current hapless power play and the effort needs to be more consistent, especially against bad teams at home or really anyone at home these days. Aside from all that, there just doesn’t seem to be enough urgency as a whole in the organization and this is my cue to (for the first time really) rip the GM.
It’d probably be wrong of me to second-guess every move of Fitz’s this offseason since I either liked or understood what he did, but pretty much everything Fitz did has not worked out. The Tyler Toffoli trade is pretty much indicative of our whole offseason, looked great on paper – a third-round pick and a guy who’d fallen down in the pecking order in Yegor Sharangovich for a guy who had 30+ goals and 70+ points in Calgary last year? No-brainer on paper, and yet Toffoli has been straight trash since December started and replacing a guy who grew up in the system with a merc on a lame-duck deal probably changes the chemistry too. Five goals (which include the ultimate junktime tally last night in a 6-1 game) and four assists in 23 games just is not anywhere close to good enough. I don’t want to hear that ‘scorers are streaky’, especially when this one literally adds nothing other than scoring.
As for Sharangovich? Amazing what getting a chance elsewhere can do for you…19 goals and 32 points in 46 games, both totals better than Toffoli’s, much better in points (17 goals and 30 points). I couldn’t be happier for the kid, who was a character and always seemingly came to the rink with a positive attitude. Sharangovich is the ultimate cautionary tale for our treatment of Holtz. Let’s not continue to overlook him here and watch him blossom elsewhere – and in Sharangovich’s case, re-blossom after two pretty decent seasons at the start of his career.
Clearly I understood letting Damon Severson and Ryan Graves go, to get younger on cheaper on the blueline while necessarily re-signing Bratt and Timo to lucrative extensions up front. As of now though, only Bratt looks close to being an $8 million player and he’s not quite lived up to that billing the last few weeks either. And yes, we’ve had infinitely more problems defensively than last year but a lot of that is due to Dougie being out while Marino and Siegs have been underachieving. It would be nice to have better options on the PK than a regressed Marino, Smith (who’s now injured) and a whole lot of kids though. I also understood keeping Lindy off a team-record points season but clearly that isn’t working out either.
It’s hard even now to get on Fitz for his goalie decisions (or indecisions?) given what little there is on the market and the overinflated prices of anyone who is but at a certain point you have to take the hit when almost none of your moves at the position work out. From the injury to Jonathan Bernier to the retirement of Corey Crawford and the regression of both Vitek and Akira Schmid this year, the question has to be asked who’s to blame for the constant issues at that position? The GM for making all the wrong moves? A terrible goalie coach? A defense that’s been bad every year except last year, which not-so-coincidentally is the one season we had decent goaltending for much of the year? It’s more likely some combination of all three but whatever it is, needs to be sorted out sooner rather than later, especially before we ruin both Schmid and Daws playing behind a tire fire of a team and completely eviscerate poor Vitek who’s already one step from being run out of town on a rail after being such a big part of last year’s success.
More than even any decisions Fitz has or hasn’t made, my big problem with him right now is twofold…one, you just can’t let this season slip away without at least attempting to shake things up. I call it the Joe Douglas school of sitting on your hands when the team is crumbling around you, not even attempting to do anything to change the culture, chemistry, talent, etc ruined my Jets’ season and it’s about to ruin the Devils’ season as well. If you don’t want to fire the head coach whatever, DO SOMETHING, literally. Hold someone accountable for these constant clown shows. For too long we had a lassiez-faire atitude toward things around here when everything constantly went wrong and that was part of our culture of losing.
Last year everything went right aside from the first two games of the season and playoffs, and the team smashed through its glass ceiling of expectations but now the standard should be higher than just shrug your hands and blame injuries if things don’t go well this year. We traded for Timo and re-signed him long-term, re-signed Bratt long-term, traded for Toffoli and all on top of a core that broke our playoff drought and won our first postseason series in over a decade against the hated Rangers. Yes, Jack and Dougie are hurt – tough noogies. Jack’s not out for the whole season and it’s not like we were smashing teams with them in the lineup either. Hold someone accountable for goodness sakes! I’d even take a goalie coach change at this point, cause even that’s above what we’ve done or are probably going to do in terms of holding feet to the fire.
Accountability needs to start at the top though, and that leads to my second big criticism of Fitz…where are you, my dude? You can’t go on every show and podcast known to man last year from TSN to Spitting Chicklets, take all the plaudits thrown your way when the team’s going well and then just hide in the bunker this year when things aren’t going to plan. Especially with the expectations surrounding this year’s team, missing the playoffs would be an utter disaster. I get you can do that because the New Jersey media isn’t exactly going to hunt you down like Canadian media or New York media would, but that doesn’t make it right. Fitz and Lindy must love being in New Jersey with the lack of media to hold their feet to the fire, no wonder Lindy got testy when a young reporter dared to ask him about Holtz, most of the media here is either state-run (i.e. team stuff) or too worried about their own jobs to push back against the head coach or publicly wonder where the GM is now that he isn’t looking for pats on the back.
Like I said before, I haven’t exactly felt like doing a blog most of the time because I don’t want to just rant day after day about the state of this team sitting on the wrong side of the bubble for the playoffs due to mistakes and oversights of its own doing without any sign things are going to change. Thankfully I will not be at tomorrow’s game against Vegas (I don’t generally go to three games in a week anyway) but I fully expect things to get ugly if we get whipped again and even the local media won’t be able to get away from asking questions about guys’ futures here. Say what you want about Lou and his career post-2012 or even about his choice for a replacement head coach on Long Island yesterday, but he showed again with the firing of Lane Lambert and hiring of Patrick Roy that he still won’t stand for underperformance, and he’s still willing to think outside the box.
There’s only three more games left before the All-Star week off, so at least I have two weeks off from the next time I have to concern myself with seeing a trash performance in person. Hopefully the next time I write a blog (likely after we’ve hit the All-Star break) it’ll be after the outlook is better…or at least after changes have finally been made.
hasan4978
Derek
Battle Of Hudson 
This was excellent, Hasan.
LikeLike