If you want to know what it’s like to simultaneously want to rant about your team and just don’t really give a fig anymore, try being a Devils fan this year. With expectations high after a franchise-best total of wins last year and a memorable first-round win over the Rangers followed by an offseason of re-signing key forwards Jesper Bratt and Timo Meier, it seemed as if all the pieces were in place for another run at least into mid-Spring hockey if not further. With the Devils sitting seven points out of the last automatic division playoff spot and five points behind Tampa for the final wild card, time is running out for this team to even start to come close to living up to expectations.

Every time I think the Devils are finished, the pack comes back to them and they fluke their way to a couple of wins – a la the post-All Star break mini-surge. And every time I think we’re at least on the path back to relevance they crash into a wall, like the Kings loss last week after said surge, or the simultaneous body blows of losing to the Caps and Rangers this week after their outdoor series win on Saturday. It almost seems like that game was our Stanley Cup for this year, given how the team’s responded before and after the Flyers game.

Even with how angry this team has made me this season, you can’t fault them for losing to the Rangers last night in a vacuum. They do look like the best team in the league at this point, and last night’s game definitely had a 2015 feel to it where they were on top of the world and we looked like a bunch of bums. They aren’t going to ultimately miss the playoffs because of losing to the Rangers, they’ll miss because of all of the garbage teams and mediocrity they’ve lost to this season, particularly at home. Among others, we’ve single-handedly kept an aged Caps team in the playoff hunt with no fewer than three losses to them this season, including two at home. Just winning two of those games would have us squarely on the bubble while the Caps would have been more or less eliminated by now, nearly ten points back.

As big of an embarrassment as the Devils have been on-ice this season, recapping the last two games and the hideous power play last night aren’t worth my time, especially since they’ve become a bigger one off-ice, which is really the source of my angst at this point. It’s one thing to be underperforming and have an off year, quite another to have zero accountability from top to bottom in this organization and I’ll start at the top, or at least as top-down as hockey operations gets – GM Tom Fitzgerald, which is quite frankly where it needs to start. I know some will say it should start with the owners, but these owners strike me as pretty hands-off when it comes to judging results and probably hands-on in other picayune and annoying ways, but I’m not there and don’t work with them so that part is just conjecture.

What is not conjecture is Fitz’s cowardly behavior this season, first of all not publicly facing the music himself for an underperforming team on the ice, or for the shame of employing two of the five people charged in the 2018 Hockey Canada scandal. After a 2022-23 regular season and off season where Fitz couldn’t find enough podcasts to go on and take all the back patting for the Devils’ turnaround, the silence has been deafening this year. Other than one lousy half-hour press conference announcing his own extension, conveniently timed less than twenty-four hours before the Hockey Canada fallout came to light. Even with the outdoor game, it was franchise legend Martin Brodeur who was the public pointman and not Fitz, almost as if he was using Marty as a human shield to avoid coming out of the bunker.

Not only does Fitz fail to stand up and be accountable himself, but he refuses to hold anyone else accountable for this season. I’m not even sure he buys that anything is wrong, to be honest. Apart from ‘injuries and goaltending’ at least, which yes is A factor but hardly the only factor. Not when you continually underperform against bad teams and get off to hideous early starts game after game. Not when your power play has been allowed to rot at a league-worst pace for the last two months without any real change to the personnel or structure with last night’s embarrassment of not even getting a good chance on a five-minute major early in the contest a perfect prism for how sorry this power play is. Not when people like Luke Hughes make mistake after mistake without so much as sitting a shift (with last night being the nadir of a poor last several weeks for the younger Hughes), while god forbid Alex Holtz doesn’t have a tape-to-tape pass he gets thrown back in the doghouse.

God forbid he should ever hold the coaches accountable for the team underperforming much less any players, this was once an organization where coaches of first-place teams would get canned because the team still wasn’t living up to high standards. Now it’s find every excuse under the sun to avoid throwing anyone under the bus, and blame the media the rare time where they actually dare to level any criticism at the organization. Specifically our so-called head coach Lindy Ruff, who attributed our poor power play recently to an unlikely source.

Oh you mean the NEW JERSEY media, who basically isn’t even allowed to ask questions in a critical way? That media?! If you don’t believe me, ask NJ.com beat guy Ryan Novozinsky, who got clapped back at by the coach twice in two seasons basically for the sin of asking why a certain player’s icetime was low in a given game (last season Jesper Bratt, this season Holtz) and got frozen out of even being able to ask a question last night. If Lindy thinks Novo and the NJ media is so bad, I’d love to see him try to coach in Toronto or Montreal where he and Fitz wouldn’t be able to get away with hunkering down and giving zero figs about answering to anyone. Not to mention our local broadcast team who’s always veered on the blind homer side but even a guy like Bryce Salvador seems to have been leaned on after an earlier-season rant about the team needing to have more passion – now he’s just as much of a company man as Dano and everyone else is. Even last year when I wanted Lindy fired, I always had respect for him as a person but I’ve lost a lot of that this year, he’s become just as defiant and whiny as anyone else without any of the right answers all year long when he hasn’t even been asked the tough questions for most of it.

My beef with the off-ice personnel doesn’t even end with Lindy, Fitz or the rest of our lousy coaching staff though. You would like to think a team that spends up to the cap and where money’s no object with these owners – at the very least that they would also have the best medical personnel money could buy. Instead, our crack medical staff continually okays injured players to come back in the game after they’ve had their bell rung, and they wind up leaving later the same night with Nathan Bastian being the latest example yesterday. He gets taken out by a predatory hit to the head, then is allowed to go back on the ice in the second period only to get taken out for good after another hit up high. It’s one thing when this happens to a fourth liner, but it’s also happened to both our franchise centers this year as well. The one with Nico Hischer against the Sabres early in the season was particularly galling since it led to a much longer stay on IR, before the whole ‘needing to win every game’ mindset should have even been a thought.

So let’s see, there’s no accountability for the GM, for the coaches or for the medical team. Now let’s get to the players, where there’s selective accountability on a good night, and none at all most other nights. My annoyance with this coach’s singling out of Holtz time and again is well documented at this point, I’m tired of urinating into the wind. Holtz in himself is small potatoes anyway, compared to the larger issue of the amount of mistakes and dead efforts from the rest of the roster. Where are the bag skates and benchings?! I’d love to see Jacques Lemaire get a month with this group, they’d get a reality check very quickly. Our collective arrogance as an organization in the wake of last year has manifested itself into a ‘we’ll give effort when we need to’ mindset, which is absolutely the wrong one to have.

Part of me attributes the lack of consequences for Luke specifically screwing up time and again the last several weeks to the fact he’s Jack’s brother, and Jack publicly standing up for Lindy is a big reason he kept his job two years ago. The Hugheses cannot be allowed to run the team though, especially when neither is playing well to begin with. Luke may have crashed into the rookie wall weeks ago, but something also hasn’t been right with Jack since about mid-December. It’d be one thing if you could just attribute that to playing hurt and for the first time our so-called coach threw that out as an excuse last night, but that also doesn’t explain Jack losing his head against the Ducks and Kings getting into it with other players and the refs, or losing his mind at home against the Flyers in late December with two hideous game-losing turnovers.

Not that they’re the only ones, I could name several people by name that I think have coasted this year starting with our ‘glue guy role player’ Dawson Mercer, who went from a 27 goal, 56 point +22 season last year to a meager 26 points and -17 in 56 games so far this year. He’s gone from a guy you had to long-term extend to one you clearly should bridge. Speaking of a guy that we might have been better off seeing more from before extending, where in the world of Carmen Sandiego is Timo Meier? Yes, I know – he’s hurt, playing his off wing, Lindy doesn’t like him – at some point the player needs to produce too. Ten goals and a -25 in 43 games just isn’t good enough for our highest paid forward. Is Ondrej Palat alive this year? 8 goals and 22 points in 46 games just isn’t good enough (neither is the lack of leadership which was supposed to be his calling card), and that’s before I even touch the regression from ‘key’ members of the defense like John Marino and Jonas Siegenthaler pre-injury.

Yes we know the goalies suck, despite Nico Daws’ heroic two weeks stretch where predictably our brilliant head coach overplayed him until he ran out of gas and now he’s been capsized just like he was two years ago, with this same staff. With Akira Schmid struggling in Utica, our options for this weekend are either a fried rookie, a raw rookie in recently signed Isaac Poulter or a possibly returning at less than 100% Vitek Vanecek, who was the worst goalie in the league this year AT 100%. Every single goalie on our roster the last few years struggling and regressing goes back to coaching once again, so does continually putting guys out of their best position like Timo at LW or Jack at wing. There’s plenty of anger to go around for everyone though.

As such I likely won’t be writing for a while, I need a mental health break from the Devils right now (and really in general, but there’s less options for getting a health break from a stressful new job at my old company where the new owner is quite honestly even more dense – and certainly more of a whip-cracker – than the people running the Devils). Last night I snapped and left after the first period, which isn’t usually something I’d entertain but given just how awful the events of the first period were and how pathetic the team has been for most of the year I knew how the script would turn out, and I didn’t want to do or say something I’d regret the rest of the night when I was already on my last nerve, a la Billy Crystal as a ref in Forget Paris during the scene where he snaps, ejecting everyone and their grandmother from the arena.

I was supposed to go to tomorrow’s game but took a punt and sold my ticket a couple hours ago, after I’d already sold Sunday’s game weeks ago expecting to go twice in three days this week before what could be a last-straw game against the Lightning. Might as well take advantage of the market prices as long as possible before ticket prices you would think crater post-deadline (my next home game is now March 5, three days before a trade deadline that should veer more toward being a seller than anyone would have ever predicted before the season). I’m not sure how much things will improve by then either for the team or myself off the ice, but at least with the Devils their course should be known by then one way or the other. If it’s being a seller like I’m starting to expect at this point, the good news is the pressure will be off the games by then and I’ll just go to watch my last several games and see my arena friends as much as possible before a long summer. If this team still has an illusory chance at the playoffs, maybe I’ll be able to sell a couple more games at a decent price and extend my leave.