More than a month after the Devils’ season came to a quiet end, and closer to two months since I stopped caring about the 2023-24 season, the Devils finally have made some big news in the announcement of a new head coach. On the one hand, I’m not surprised one of the bigger names on the market in Sheldon Keefe has apparently taken the job, on the other I’m relieved that GM Tom Fitzgerald seemingly put a little ego aside after last year’s reality check and went for (arguably) the best guy available rather than just rolling the dice on some young assistant who’ll presumably do management’s bidding and go by the numbers.

Say what you want about Keefe and his failure to get the Leafs over the top, but having experience managing younger star players in a big market can only help here. Heck, he doesn’t even need to worry about the bigger market here – we’ll be a day at the beach for him compared to the Toronto meat grinder, which by all accounts he seemingly handled well without snapping at the media in potentially viral moments. If you want to look for viral moments, only two stand out – one of them his good-bye message less than two weeks ago to Leafs fans, presumably on vacation after a brutal end to his season, the other being footage of an intermission playoff team talk. You definitely see…fire in that one at least. Seemingly more so than at least our last few head coaches.

I don’t remember even thinking Keefe was a possibility last month when I was wondering who Fitz was going to get as our next coach considering he was still employed by the Leafs as of two weeks ago, although you know certain coaches might be on the hot seat if they don’t get playoff results and he was obviously one of them. Are there reservations he could be one of those guys who continually finds ways to come up short, sure but let’s be honest – we can’t concern ourselves with playoff exits yet until we start consistently making the playoffs again. Last year surprising the league didn’t cement us as a perennial winner, as this year proved.

Plus, it’s not like the coaching market was full of proven winners – forgetting about the two recent Cup-winning sociopaths who shall remain nameless since they likely won’t be getting jobs this offseason anyway (one being still on the ineligible list, the other likely getting himself blackballed after the Columbus fiasco last fall), where were the guys with better track records than Keefe on the market? You could argue Craig Berube, who does have a Cup win but is also under .500 in the playoffs, and his teams declined in St. Louis while they got a significant new coach bounce the rest of this season.

Thing is, I think Toronto (once they became available) was always going to have first pick of the available coaches and they clearly wanted Berube themselves. They’ve been more consistent winners than we have in recent years with several big-name stars in their prime, and a star-crossed big hockey market where if you win there, you’re forever a legend a la Theo Epstein with both the Red Sox and Cubs in baseball. Given that Toronto hired him, and the fact guys like Mike Sullivan and Rod Brind’Amour who were rumored to move this offseason didn’t, then we were likely going to have the next pick of coaches available. Fitz did take his time, seeing which way the playoff landscape fell – but also acted quickly when Keefe became available.

Admittedly I’ve paid very little attention to Keefe as Leafs coach so I can’t really give the first critique of whether I think he’ll solve our structural issues or enforce accountability up and down the roster and not just with younger players and role guys. Let’s be honest, he also took over the Leafs after their rebuild and their first couple of playoff appearances, so it’s hard to say how much he really had to do with winning or losing there…but I can’t really knock just making the playoffs after our post-2012 record of only making it twice and just winning one playoff series total. I don’t know how much you can fault him for losing to teams like Boston, Tampa and more recently Florida in the postseason with the Leafs’ stacked division the last few years but for whatever reason he couldn’t take the Leafs to that next level.

You can’t win or lose anything at a press conference, but I’ll be looking forward to starting to learn about our new head coach whenever we actually announce his hiring officially and schedule the presser. Especially since the offseason’s been a bit of a wet blanket so far. We didn’t move up or down in the NHL Draft this time, which I’m more than fine with to be honest, I’d rather just get the draft over with and not be reminded of this past season ever again, and hopefully this’ll be the last draft where I’m actually paying attention to a first-round pick for the next several years. Fitz jumping the shark to re-sign four-minute a game enforcer Kurtis MacDermid (he of the zero career playoff games played) to a three-year deal was eye-rolling. Not exactly cost prohibitive given he signed at barely above minimum salary, but still eye-rolling. Today’s not the day for the goon debate though.

Ironically the only coach openings who have been filled so far this offseason besides us and the Leafs were the two guys both hired…after being let go by us in the last few months. Unless you’ve been living on Mars, you know that Lindy Ruff’s ‘gone home again’ to Buffalo in a pairing that optically fits both sides. One of my friends was like, why would they hire him – he sucks and I was like well, they had their best success (and consistently) in almost thirty years with him as the coach lol. Besides, it’s not like they’ve been hiring winners since letting him go anyway.

To be fair, we had our best success in the last decade with Lindy as well before the roof fell in this year. We don’t have to get into why or assign portions of blame, which is basically an opinion from the outside anyway. True, second time around doesn’t usually work, Jacques Lemaire 2.0 was one example of this with us in 2010 – or Jacques Martin with Ottawa a lot more recently – but with the Sabres’ lack of post-Lindy success it only made sense to bring in someone with credibility among the fanbase and give him a crack with a younger roster. What made far less sense to me was Ottawa jumping to hire…Travis Green?! Really?! Maybe they’re hoping to catch lightning in a bottle the way the Canucks did with Rick Tocchet this year after he failed twice as a head coach before, but there’s no real tangible rationalization for them to have not only hired Green but done it so early in the offseason as if they were worried other teams would be in on him.

Some organizations just show you why they lose. To be fair we haven’t exactly left loserville permanently yet either, but at least Fitz is trying the right thing now. You can’t exactly trust a win-now team that still needs direction to an inexperienced younger coach and unless you wanted to hope fifth time would be the charm for a guy like Bruce Boudreau, Keefe was the chalk play and one with no apparent prior connection to Fitz so it doesn’t seem like a nepotism hire at least. Now we see what Fitz and the rest of his management team will do with the roster on the ice going forward.