One year ago to the day last season, we were getting ready for Game 1 of the playoffs and a hotly anticipated series with the Rangers after setting a franchise record for wins in the regular season. Not that I particularly want to remember Game 1, or Game 2 for that matter, but even looking like we were going to get drubbed in a playoff series is still better than the outlook this April 10 – where we’re picking up the pieces after yet another elimination day. Our removal from the playoff picture was finally confirmed last night after a 5-2 loss to the Leafs, with other OOT results ensuring the Devils won’t make the playoffs for the tenth time in the last twelve seasons.

Mercifully this season has three now-meaningless games (at least for us) left in the next week, and only one more home game – which yes, I will be at and kind of hoping it does have some meaning for the Isles. Then again, would I really care if bumping the Isles out of the playoffs meant say, the collapsing Flyers or rancid Caps make it and are just cannon fodder for the Rangers or whomever in the first round? It would be a further humiliation in a sense if Lou Lamoriello’s Isles made the postseason for a fifth time in six seasons with a couple of deep playoff runs included in that, but honestly this group deserves the humiliation of that, or perhaps even the realistic nuclear scenario of a certain rival team winning it all.

Of course, we have enough of our own problems to attend to without worrying about what the Isles or Rangers do this Spring. How current GM Tom Fitzgerald deals with those issues will go a long way toward determining what season was closer to being the fluke – last year’s breakout or this year’s regression? Sure you can’t expect 50+ wins and 110+ points every year, but I was hoping we were at least past the days of watching lotto drawings and ending our season in early to mid April. The fact we could possibly finish under NHL .500 with as few as 79 points and such an anticlimactic, early exit is inexcusable by any metric.

We know what the…marquee issues are this offseason, namely goaltending and coaching. There are few – if any – easy solutions for either, but things need to at least get better than they were this year when the Devils inarguably had the worst goalies in the league for 3/4 of the season, and quite possibly also the worst coaching staff in the league though there’s no metric really to measure that. Starting with the coaching – the fact we’ve already had one coach fired and another almost certainly a week away from being dismissed off the same staff speaks volumes. Especially since each hire was at least in part influenced by Fitz’s personal relationships with both.

If you’re Lindy Ruff, you might feel a touch vindicated that the team’s results haven’t improved under the uninspiring Travis Green but when a team underachieves as badly as this one, there’s plenty of blame to go around. There’s no point in rehashing all my grievances over Lindy and as far as Green goes, it’s hard to believe the new coach bump has actually led to the team going backwards in every area except goaltending. Sure, trade deadline defections didn’t help but come on now…without even half of these blown multi-goal leads in the last three weeks we’d likely be in the ‘playoff hunt’ till the final game at the very least instead of being stuck in the purgatory of being 5-7 points back for the last several weeks. We didn’t start games well with Lindy and haven’t finished them well under Green, sure signs of an underachieving team.

Of course overall goaltending didn’t help, especially in Lindy’s case when all three of our pre-trade deadline goalies wound up with strikingly similar splits (all of them bad):

Vitek Vanecek – 29 starts w/a 3.18 GAA and .890 save percentage

Nico Daws – 20 starts w/a 3.15 GAA and .894 save percentage

Akira Schmid – 15 starts w/a 3.15 GAA .895 save percentage

I intentionally left out won-loss records cause honestly Vitek’s got inflated by a lot of early season games where we did have a largely healthy roster that was able to outscore his mistakes, but in the long run they have to get better play from the guys in between the pipes. Was the improvement from post-deadline acquisitions Jake Allen and Kaapo Kahkonen a matter of personnel change or system change to a far more conservative approach under Green? Probably a little of both plus in Allen’s case you could tell he just has more moxie than Vitek and more experience than either of our kids from his first start when he gave up two goals on three shots in the first period – then he told the team during intermission he would clamp down and he did in a surprise win at Dallas.

Of course you also can’t overly buy into this quasi-junktime stretch either given Allen and Kahkonen’s recent track records before they arrived. Allen should be a backup next year, while Kahkonen would slot in nicely as a swing #3 – if we didn’t already have Utica backloaded with younger goalies (Schmid, Daws and Isaac Poulter). Given that Allen’s under contract for next year and Kahkonen isn’t, it’s obviously far more likely Allen returns but they still need to make a big move for a 1A goalie. All of the kids looked like they need more time in Utica, though Daws would probably be fine in the Allen role as a 1B if they don’t overwhelm him with too many starts in a row the way they have in both of his callups after initial positive early impressions. Where that solution comes from and how much it costs is up to Fitz, but we’ve had enough seasons of moneyballing goalies that have backfired where we really can’t afford to risk punting another season on inadequate or injury-prone guys.

Obviously, whoever comes in next year would also be helped by a better system then our ‘everyone tries to play everywhere except where they’re supposed to play’ chaos system we used under Lindy. It was one thing to play that system when you had vets Damon Severson and Ryan Graves as your #4 and #5 defensemen, another when you’re breaking in two kids (Simon Nemec and Luke Hughes) with key roles and giving another inexperienced guy (Kevin Bahl) increased minutes as well. Not to mention our turnover at the forward spot didn’t help team cohesion defensively either. Still, the D needs to be addressed even with the return of Dougie Hamilton from injury and the increased maturity of Nemec and Luke, preferably with a LHD who brings a physical element to a finesse blueline.

We also need to properly evaluate the other returning vets we do have – like the team itself, is John Marino closer to last year’s breakout form, or this year’s guy who looked like the Penguin discard we thought he was two years ago? Jonas Siegenthaler has gotten even more away from his form of 2-3 years ago than Marino, and these are supposed to be the stabilizing forces on a D with a lot of youth on it. And I’m sorry, he may be the most well-liked guy in the room but they absolutely cannot bring back Brendan Smith unless he’s going to be used where he should be – as a swing forward D and short-term fill-in due to injury. Given the fact he’s already been overused by two coaches, I don’t really trust a third Fitz pick won’t do the same.

Up front is the hardest position to critique for a variety of reasons so let’s start with the low-hanging fruit…our depth certainly needs improvement. Whereas last year we had enough depth to scratch guys who had the talent to score thirty goals (Yegor Sharangovich) or play a fairly regular shift on one of the best teams in the league (Jesper Boqvist), this year the depth took a tremendous hit. When you have at least one of Max Willman or Chris Tierney – who are basically AHL/NHL tweeners – taking a regular shift, not to mention Kurtis MacDermid and his four minutes a night then you’re clearly lacking up front but hey, at least he gave us this moment.

Sure, the Mike McLeod situation didn’t help our depth either, but it certainly shouldn’t have been a total surprise that he could possibly be exiled due to the cloud over the Hockey Canada scandal. Imports like Tomas Nosek failed, while Nathan Bastian seemingly just didn’t provide as much of a spark this year as in prior seasons. The less said about the Alex Holtz situation, the better at this point. You wouldn’t even know he had 16 goals based on the way he gets marginalized, and with a roster that has such depth issues it’s doubly inexcusable. Of course, it’s also true you wouldn’t even know Holtz was taking a shift if he didn’t have those 16 goals since he adds little else and you would think two coaches and a GM all can’t be wrong about this guy constantly needing a kick in the butt. I guess we’ll find out at his next stop. Of all our issues, the back line forwards is both the lowest in terms of marquee value and the one I’m most confident Fitz will eventually address.

When it comes to the top six, the picture is less clear and more gray. Specifically where it comes to star forward Jack Hughes and 2022-23 breakout Dawson Mercer. Of course everyone knows Hughes is all-world offensively, but having two separate shoulder surgeries at this point of his career isn’t ideal from a hockey standpoint. And some of his maturity issues – which cropped up as the team started to lose more and he had to manage injuries – also need to be addressed. In many ways getting punked with two straight losses to the Kings after his infamous ‘they pay to see me play’ chirp was a fitting prism for this year’s Devils as a whole, along with his two crippling giveaways in a December loss to the Flyers. Great talent, but bad habits, hubris and thinking they were better than they were proved to be a big part of their downfall in the end.

At least Hughes you can largely say put up the point total he should have with 74 in 62 games, in spite of clearly managing a shoulder injury for the last couple months of the season to the point where he couldn’t take faceoffs. To this end I’ll give him credit, it’s hard to criticize a player for wanting to play. Of course it’s also hard not to criticize the Devils for trying to have their cake and eat it too. They clearly knew Hughes was hurt given the fact he didn’t play at center the last couple months and didn’t even practice the last few weeks. Yet after making a move toward waving the white flag by dealing Tyler Toffoli and Colin Miller at the deadline, they still ran out Hughes for weeks after that in a faux playoff chase before finally, mercifully shutting him down last night. To me it kind of smacked of what Hughes himself said…’they pay to see me play’. I’m not sure it’s a coincidence he played until just before the next to last home game of the season.

Obviously Hughes will be here, so should Mercer but his downturn this season needs to be examined at least. After a 27 goal, 56-point +22 season last year which led to him being untouchable in a Timo Meier deal, he regressed to 20 goals, 33 points and a -24 this year in spite of again playing every game. His durability was the only thing that hasn’t regressed. Did he, like the team as a whole lose some of their competitive desire this year? Did a bad start just destroy his confidence? I wouldn’t trade him at a low ebb of his value but by the same token, sometimes you kind of need to move on from talented guys for non-hockey reasons a la Lou trading Jason Arnott and Petr Sykora during and after 2021-22.

At least with Timo himself, there’s a bit less uncertainty than there was two months ago given his resurgence back into the player we traded for. How much of that resurgence you want to chalk up to good health and how much it is playing RW and getting more first-unit power play time will likely never be measured. I could do without Timo himself constantly insinuating that it was the latter when even he himself admitted he wasn’t fully healthy until several weeks ago, but hey so long as he actually shows up from the opening faceoff next season and doesn’t get benched several games in, he can say what he wants so long as he keeps producing.

While there’s no question about captain Nico Hischier or winger Jesper Bratt – both among the few players to live up to either their contract or rep this season – there’s definitely question over who’ll replace Toffoli (still only one goal behind Nico and Jack for the team lead after being traded more than a month ago) on the wing? Holtz would have been the logical long-term replacement but he’s more than likely on his way out of town after the organization seemed to blame him from everything for everyone else’s mistakes to Lindy’s firing. They also have to upgrade over Ondrej Palat, obviously with his deal he’s not going anywhere but after an injury-plagued first season followed by a meh 11-goal, 31 point second season you can’t really pen him in for the top six either.

Before Fitz even answers the personnel questions above though, he needs to examine why a team that so much was expected of achieved so little. Why did this team continue to play down to inferior opposition time and time again? Why did they start games so poorly under Lindy and end them so poorly with Green? Why was there so little pushback physically at any point in the season until the glorified junktime sideshow against the Rangers? Writing this season off as an injury-caused anomaly sunk by bad goaltending and coaching is being nieve. Especially since you picked the goalies and coaches, Fitz. You can’t count on the amount of good health all your key players enjoyed in 2022-23. And you ran and hid for most of the season when things started to spiral sideways. Accountability needs to start at the top.

It’s going to be a long offseason, difficult decisions should and need to be made. The one good thing about getting bounced early is that time is on your side. Of course for a fan, it’l be a long, boring wait to see the resolution develop on stuff we have no control over. On the one hand I’m relieved I don’t have to deal with this group of underachievers anymore after next Monday’s home finale (and I’ll be walking out of my seat shortly before the final buzzer, this team doesn’t deserve a sendoff), on the other it’ll be two months before anything aside from perhaps the coaching change happens, and another six months before meaningful hockey again. As this’ll be my last blog for a while, figured I’d better give the full season recap slash offseason preview before going back into hibernation from hockey.