Despite everything that’s gone wrong with the Devils this season, one thing that (as of yet) has been unchanged from the last few years is their head-scratching dominance against the Pittsburgh Penguins, particularly at the Prudential Center. Granted, it’s not like this version of the Penguins has been any better than us this year with their own high-priced disappointment of a team well out of the playoff hunt. Still, even given the team’s unlikely chances of even staying in the playoff race until April it’s always nice to see a win at home, and a mostly stress-free 5-2 game at that.

Last night’s game has certainly been a rarity at home where they’ve won just sixteen of thirty-five games and their countless number of losses to teams even below them in the standings are the main reason they won’t be in the playoffs. Yes they’re ‘six points back’ of Detroit for the last wild card spot, with an asterisk since the Capitals are also five points ahead with two games in hand. Even with the rest of the East playing down to the so-called competition for a playoff spot, time’s still running out for the Devils. It surely won’t prevent us from running Jake Allen into the ground making start after start the way we did Nico Daws, and it won’t prevent us playing a clearly injured Jack Hughes until the bitter end.

I can’t say I really expect any different from an interim staff coaching for their jobs, but it still comes off as a bit of a mixed message organizationally when you trade guys like Tyler Toffoli and Colin Miller (both will be back in town tomorrow when the Jets come in ironically) at the deadline on the one hand, but on the other hand act like you’re still in a playoff hunt. If you really wanted to use the last twenty games to play for the future and load management guys till next year you wouldn’t have a coach who is clearly looking for another chance to get back behind the bench next year overseeing it.

To be fair, at least Travis Green did one good thing last night that predecessor Lindy Ruff did not – giving Alex Holtz a chance on the Hughes line and not even benching him after a poor turnover in the third period that reportedly had broadcaster Ken Daneyko apoplectic on the air, I didn’t even notice it to be fair, but I didn’t notice Holtz at all for most of the game so I was down on him regardless – until he got himself in the right place at the right time and scored the key third goal early in the third period last night. Holtz’s goal gave the Devils some breathing room against the Penguins after a sloppy first two periods where both goalies Allen and Tristian Jarry made some fine saves to keep the score at 2-1.

While the Devils’ dominance over the Penguins hasn’t changed, and neither has their current position in the standings, there is a lot different now since my last blog. Last night’s game was the first full game I’d been to or even watched since the home embarrassment against the Rangers. With the Devils on the outside looking in at the playoffs and even Tom Fitzgerald acknowledging the playoff odds were at like 13% when answering why he did the Toffoli trade at the deadline, their trade deadline was more about next year. Not only did Toffoli and Miller go packing to Winnipeg for draft picks, but there were also belated goalie moves starting with acquiring Allen from the Canadiens for a conditional third-rounder, and also dealing off the injured Vitek Vanecek to San Jose for Kaapo Kahkonen and his expiring contract.

For Vitek, it was a sad but quiet ending after a mostly promising first season when his 33 wins in the regular season were the most by any Devil goalie in over a decade, since Martin Brodeur was still between the pipes. We all know about the playoff breakdowns last spring, and he never really found his footing again this year (to put it mildly), though Vitek somehow compiled another 17 wins in 32 games despite a 3.18 GAA and .890 save percentage. On top of not playing well, he picked up an injury a few weeks ago that after the trade Fitz admitted publicly might keep him out the rest of the year. After Daws got overused and short-circuited in recent weeks, the Devils clearly needed other bodies in net to protect their young netminders from going down with the ship.

Not that Kahkonen is anything great, but I can’t really come up with a rationale for why San Jose wanted to do that deal apart from they wanted a cheap filler guy for next season, and hopefully for Vitek’s sake he can rebound now out of the spotlight. It won’t be easy for him on a rebuilding team though. Even Fitz admitted that trade was about ‘flexibility’ meaning the Sharks took back the extra year on Vitek’s deal and we’ll almost certainly let Kahkonen remain an expiring contract. Of the two goalies, Allen was clearly more of an acquisition both for the rest of this season and for next year as well. Admittedly I’m a bit surprised looking at Allen’s numbers the last two years up north, I knew he’d been bad but sixty-three games with around a 3.6 GAA and .890 save percentage?! Speaks to the state of our goaltending that this guy was looked at as part of the solution.

We were rumored in on Allen for months given the obvious reasons – our need in goal, not to mention his connection with Marty going back to the days when Brodeur was in the Blues’ front office while he was having his best years as a starter there. Maybe Marty does have some secret sauce for Allen, as the early returns on his three starts have been good with six goals allowed and a .946 save percentage. What’s actually galling about the Allen trade is it came a few months too late and it came out after the deadline that he’d been asked to waive his no-trade earlier in the season (for us) and declined. His rationale was that Vitek and Akira Schmid were here and he only saw himself being in the same role he had been placed in with the Canadiens, as an emergency third goalie. From an outside perspective, it’s totally understandable you don’t want to uproot for a perceived similar role.

Of course, anyone who’d been watching the Devils semi-regularly like us fans would have realized Allen would have been at worst #2 the minute he walked in the door with a very short climb to being the 1A, despite his own poor numbers. There was no way he could have really known that the organization didn’t want to have Daws or Schmid playing games up here in the first place the way us diehards who read the team news did. Whatever the reason, his arrival likely came too late to affect this season’s playoff race but he’s starting to give the team and fanbase confidence in at least having him around as the #1B or #2 goalie next year. In the short-term I hope we don’t do to him what we did to Daws and just short-circuit him in a quixotic playoff chase. It’s likely whatever small hope they have will be obliterated tomorrow when the Jets and their ex-Devil contingent comes to town.

Among their last thirteen games (including tomorrow) are three with the Leafs, one with the white-hot Predators – now 13-0-2 in their last fifteen games under former assistant Andrew Brunette – tomorrow’s game with the Jets, and another likely home embarrassment against the Rangers in April. I know the hockey establishment loves this kid Matt Rempe because he’s a ‘throwback’ – re: looking for dirty hits and then turtling and hiding behind the ref when he gets challenged to a fight after the second time he took a Devils player out due to injury in two games. Unlike the Nathan Bastian head-hunting incident when he came back to play the next game, the one with Jonas Siegenthaler was more serious as he hasn’t returned to play yet after getting a concussion in that game at the Garden a couple weeks ago.

I doubt Rempe’s four-game suspension will be enough to curtail his reckless nature, especially when we refuse to make the Rangers pay after he gives us five-minute majors in back-to-back games! I hate going eye for an eye, but if the hockey poobahs continue to wink and nod this stuff and the refs prevent any type of so-called retribution fight, there’s only one nuclear option left to answer back with. We’ll see if that button gets pressed in early April, unlikely given the Devils’ passivity to this point although if they’re out of the playoffs by then, it might be more likely to see an ugly situation that could have been prevented if the neanderthals who run hockey and cater to that segment of the fanbase weren’t not-so-secretly happy this kid is making goonery ‘cool’ again.

Anyway, if those six games don’t eliminate us from the playoff hunt the Devils will likely find a way to do it themselves. Two games against the Senators? Why not lose to yet another garbage team, it would fit right in with the rest of this season. Game at Buffalo? Maybe earlier in the season it would have been easy since we actually put up a couple of touchdowns against them in two home games earlier this season, but that was a long time ago. Two games against the Islanders including the regular-season finale at the Rock? Wouldn’t that be fitting to see Lou Lamoriello’s team either put us out or clinch a playoff berth at our expense, although that scenario’s getting less likely as their own losing streak grows. I doubt we’ll be alive long enough for that game, or the previous game in Philly two days earlier to matter. At least we get one more chance to beat up on the Penguins at home in a couple weeks, yay for one disappointing team beating another.