Sadly the most exciting moment of the season was this nonsense which brought back visions of the 2012 line brawl at the Garden, and one that occurred after I was officially checked out of the season following another disastrous blown lead against the Penguins of all teams at home the night before. I still don’t really feel like talking much about the team per se, literally the only two games I’ve watched all the way through in the last few games were the Penguin home games I’ve been at. With the Mets already looking like a rancid team at the start of baseball season, local sports is a bit of a wasteland for me at the moment – but I’m not a Yankee/Ranger fan like Derek and countless others either, oh well.

All I’ll say about Line Fight 2.0 is that for one of the few times in his tenure, I agree with Travis Green when he implied maybe the line fight doesn’t happen last week if Rempe hadn’t run away from Kurtis MacDermid after taking out his second Devil skater in two games. Ultimately the game itself was just as predictable as the pregame shenanigans were, with the Devils blowing yet another late lead and even forcing the diehards to concede the playoffs aren’t happening this year.

Not that I truly thought the Devils still had a realistic chance at the playoffs last Tuesday when I turned up for the Penguin game, despite the fact we seem destined to spend the entire season in the purgatory of 5-7 points out of a playoff spot, just close enough to foster visions of a tease but every time we have a chance to get really close we botch it, like the Buffalo game a week and a half ago where we got off to a 2-0 lead and somehow lost in regulation. Or the Penguin disaster where we were up 3-1 in the third period and it looked like yet another ‘who’s your daddy’ type of moment before the Penguins turned that narrative on its head with five third-period goals. I was so incensed I left after the Penguins took the lead, which is a new one for me. Usually I’m not leaving a one-goal game in the third period, but the fact the Devils got behind two before I got out of the building justified that decision clearly. I was looking on Twitter for a lowlight of this game and found this from P by P announcer Bill Spaulding:

If that stat alone isn’t a perfect prism for what’s wrong with this team, the fact the team and coach couldn’t even agree on the cause of that meltdown was. Multiple team members said they played scared when the Penguins were mounting their comeback, while interim coach Travis Green attributed it more to immaturity and lack of focus. Not only is it evidence of a disconnect but honestly…they’re both probably right. This team has lacked focus all year, but also with the amount of multiple goal leads they’ve blown in the last few weeks since our airhead assistant took over, I’m sure a here we go again air took over after our third or fourth one in short order. Funny thing is under Lindy Ruff, the team started games badly and under Green, they’re ending games just as poorly. Maybe the problem isn’t just the coaches when these players can’t play sixty minutes?

Coaching is really the main reason I’m writing this blog to be honest, not to bag on our recently fired or soon-to-be fired coaches anymore, but moreso to push back against this dumb narrative I’ve seen among Devil fans everywhere from message boards to even some off-board friends that former assistant (and current Predators coach) Andrew Brunette was somehow the reason for the team’s record-breaking season last year. Given we just played them and their team is going to the playoffs while ours isn’t, now seems the most apt time for this pushback rant. All the time I hear Devil fans parrot the ‘Lindy was crap every year except when Brunette was the assistant’ line as proof positive of Brunette’s influence here. It reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite TV shows, The West Wing when CJ remarks to the president about how his Ryder Cup joke cost them in Texas and Bartlet responds in classic Barlet fashion:

Moral of that clip and my sidetrack is that you can’t assume just because one thing happens after something else happens, that the prior event was the cause. Yes, Brunette is clearly a better coach than Lindy or clueless Green – which isn’t exactly a high bar to clear. Imo, his record gets a little overstated at this point though – especially since he’s had less than two full seasons as an actual head coach. He did a good job with Florida as they set records but he wasn’t the coach at the start of the season when they started 7-0 either, nor was he the coach last year when they went to the Finals or this year when they’re still in the running for another President’s Trophy. I’m not saying anyone could have hit 120 points with that team in 2021-22, but clearly they were headed that way under their previous coach before he was outed for being a psychopath. People also act like the Nashville team he took over this year is completely devoid of talent and was a perennial loser…they’ve been competitive for two straight decades! They had 92 points last year and have 94 points in 78 games this year, that isn’t exactly a huge overall jump in spite of their recent 900-game unbeaten streak.

More to the point though, he wasn’t the head coach here! He wasn’t running things, as much as people want to attribute last year to him and no assistant coach in NHL history hast ever had a 30-point type impact on a team. If you believe he was running things then how was it only the case last year, but not every other year with all of Fitz’s other hand-picked assistants? You can’t just give the head coach no credit last year and all the blame this year. Special teams are the one thing you can overtly credit assistants on, but even the power play – which Brunette was ostensibly in charge of – wasn’t appreciably different numbers-wise last year compared to this year:

Last year – 21.9% (13th in the NHL), this year – 21.7% (14th in the NHL)

So clearly if the coaching was so much better last year but the numbers are similar, that has to mean the personnel is better this year or at least similar…and this is the biggest fallacy of all. People act like this is the same team as last year, and it’s not in so many ways that it’s mind-boggling how people attribute our dropoff to some assistant coach. Did Brunette keep Dougie Hamilton healthy last year when he had a 74-point season and set a franchise record for goals from a blueliner? Our power play looked awesome the first month of the season when Dougie was healthy this year, but then has gone in the tank for most of the season since his injury. His absence has clearly had a domino effect on the blueline as a whole too, where we had to not only replace departed UFA’s Damon Severson and Ryan Graves, but Dougie as well after the first month. As much as young defensemen Luke Hughes and Simon Nemec have impressed at different times this season, that kind of changeover has a domino effect, not to mention Jonas Siegenthaler being in and out of the lineup with injuries (and dropping off from what he was two years ago when in the lineup) and the deadline trade of Colin Miller further depleting the defense.

When it comes to Dougie specifically though, let’s be real – if they didn’t have this shot in the playoffs last year do they get embarrassed by the Rangers after being down 2-0? That’s rhetorical, we know the answer to that.

People assume because Severson and Graves have both stunk this year since moving on (and because the future and to an extent the present is bright for the two highly-prized rookies) that somehow replacing them was no big deal, but it was a luxury to have them as your #4 and #5 defensemen as opposed to this year when kids are playing big minutes and also you have to roster stiffs like Cal Foote once injuries hit, one of the two now-departed pieces of crap in the wake of the Hockey Canada scandal. You also give guys like Kevin Bahl or Brendan Smith minutes and roles they really shouldn’t have when you have a trickle-down effect, granted it doesn’t seem like this organization needs much of an excuse to play the latter. If you think that highly of the guy’s leadership then make HIM the doggone head coach next year. I’m not sure anyone’s leadership qualities should be beyond reproach after this year but that’s another debate for another day – and no I’m not taking a swipe at Nico Hischier necessarily although it’d be nice if he was more…pointed towards teammates sometimes when they have continued mental lapses.

It’s not just the defensemen that have changed over from last year though. Timo Meier was hurt on and off for at least 2/3 of the season before magically finding his health, and his game at the same time (and it started just before Lindy got fired, so it wasn’t all a Lindy issue there, though it would have been nice to play him in the role GM Tom Fitzgerald acquired him for on the power play and in the top six). Clearly Jack Hughes’ on and off injures have been a factor in the fact he hasn’t played center and is avoiding contact even more than normal. If I was going to grade players on their season, Jack would be the toughest one to grade. Sure he’s pacing at about 100 points and that was even higher before the first of his injuries early in the season, but he’s also had his moments on and off the ice where he clearly lacked focus and discipline this year and that needs to change before he becomes our version of Ilya Kovalchuk when he was a Thrasher. Flashy player who brought nothing else but points, at least ironically before he came here and Jacques Lemaire taught him to be a more complete player. Last year our big three of Jack, Nico and Jesper Bratt were healthy and producing for the whole season as well as Dougie, this year all except for Bratt have missed double-digit games due to injury.

I haven’t even gotten into goaltending and the clear differences there, what’s the point? Unless you think Brunette would somehow have gotten Vitek Vanecek’s head straight after he was already short-circuiting late last year, or kept Nico Daws from being overworked and Akira Schmid from being overwhelmed and looking like a one-hit wonder behind said unstable defense.

This isn’t to excuse this team’s immaturity at all, or the fact their mindset has clearly changed after having success. God knows I’ve ranted against both plenty of times and think all the Devils’ fans whining about coaching is a way to avoid thinking something is fundamentally wrong with our ‘talented’ roster. I’m just pointing out that we don’t exactly have the same roster this year that we did when we were scratching guys who were capable of thirty-goal seasons in the NHL (Yegor Sharangovich). Guys like Chris Tierney and Max Willman would have remained buried in the AHL all last year with that roster, this year they’re getting regular shifts and Fitz’s response to the Matt Rempe circus act this year was to bring back a designated goon.

If you’re going to be critical of the team, at least look at it with a critical eye. Simplistic reasoning is almost never the answer, especially when the simplistic reasoning is clearly a reach. It’d be one thing if Brunette was the actual head coach of the team but he wasn’t, and this idea he was running things behind the scenes like some puppetmaster is clearly just trying to shoehorn in a narrative without even acknowledging other significant changes have taken place between last year and this year in personnel, much less how the people still here have responded to a taste of success and an injury list clearly much more populated than last year. Devil fans have jumped the shark on Brunette basically from minute one when he got cheered like he was the savior-in-waiting just before the infamous opening night boos for Lindy last home opener.

Quite honestly, I’m just a bit tired of hearing and reading that from all sides. We have enough issues as it is without prematurely calling Brunette the next Bill Walsh, let go by the Bengals before going on to success in San Francisco. Plus it’s not like we outright fired him a la Walsh. When were we supposed to make him the head coach, after he got let go in Florida and Fitz had already promised Lindy a third season publicly? Or promote him after Lindy was the head coach for a team that set a franchise record in wins?

Maybe Brunette will turn out to be the one that got away and lead to Fitz’s downfall as a GM, but assuming that’s already the case is just looking for another reason to be negative. God knows we have plenty of legit reasons for that after this season, and plenty of other issues to address.