When I made my last post in the preseason about stepping away, I wasn’t sure if I was retiring or just going on a semi-scaled back version of posting. Long story short, I just wasn’t having fun writing about this team anymore and ranting about them semi-regularly had gone past being therapeutic and into masochism. I was tempted to post when the Devils had their eight-game winning streak early in the season but I just couldn’t bring myself to fully trust this franchise and they’ve shown why since then, going 14-17-2 in their last thirty-three games which honestly looks better than it’s been in actuality.

So why post now? Succinct version: It feels like we’re at a literal DEFCON 1 moment as a franchise here.

I’ve often used the old Wargames clip as a barometer for when crisis was at its highest in a given season, but what’s happened lately goes beyond even just another season going down the drain. This could well be a fork in the road moment for a franchise that needs to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask uncomfortable questions of themselves and the people around them, unfortunately I’m not sure if they have the stomach to do so. Before I even get to Luke Hughes and the disaster that was last night (see above for the abridged version), a quick recap of the first half if you will.

We started the season just the way we ended 2024-25 – losing a sloppy game in Carolina, but unlike last year the Devils responded from that setback and won their next eight games with a lot of them coming against tough teams. I’m shocked looking back on that now that we managed to beat teams like Tampa, Colorado, both of last year’s Cup finalists, etc…but things did actually look good at that point, much as they looked good for the first half of last season before the roof fell in. However, it didn’t take that long for the roof to start caving in on this season as they lost three of four games on a West Coast trip and have gone up and down like a medical chart since, although the downs have been more frequent and more time-consuming than the upward swings.

You also wouldn’t think it to look at things now, but the Devils actually won nine of their first ten home games with an OT loss being the only blemish at Prudential Center early in the season. Losing four straight at home in late November-early December put an abrupt end to our good form in front of the paying customers though, and started the clock ticking on the fans’ patience with the team that already had started to struggle on the road even before that point. Incredibly, they’ve gone 2-8-1 in New Jersey since starting the season 9-0-1 at home.

There are a million games and things I could point to from the first half that have been annoying – getting pumped twice by the Flyers inside of eight days, the home game against Tampa when Jacob Markstrom hit his nadir, giving up three goals inside the first several minutes and finally causing Sheldon Keefe to give him a deserved early hook, losing their heads against Columbus when the Blue Jackets started cheap shotting guys and blowing an early 2-0 lead when the Devils forgot to play hockey, etc etc

If I went back through all the lows of the first half I’d be here all night though. Honestly, while I’ve compared last season to 2009-10 when the Devils also had a great first half followed by a poor second half and anticlimactic early playoff exit, I never dreamed I would be comparing this season to the start of 2010-11, but at times it’s felt like we’re just a more talented, better coached version of the John MacLean-led disaster class given that most of our best players have stopped remembering how to score goals, like that team.

Not that I’m giving Keefe a pass for what’s happened the last calendar year by saying we’re better coached than 2010, on the contrary. He’s got his hands all over this mess now, between the scoring drought and with his utter lack of holding anyone not named Simon Nemec accountable for anything. At best, he’s a puppet for hapless GM Tom Fitzgerald, whose definition of a team being a family usually includes backing away from even the public appearance of tough love. When guys do the same things over and over again and don’t get punished, you wonder why players start to go through the motions and/or stay stuck in bad habits. It took two years for Fitz to finally get mad enough to call out Dawson Mercer in the end-of-season breakup meeting last year, at least he’s had a better year this year than the last couple although he’s certainly not been the force he was three years ago.

As awful as things have been on the ice, they’ve been even more dreadful off the ice starting with Fitz’s idiotic two-year extension for Markstrom, hurrying to double down on a guy who’d been playing poorly for the better part of an entire calendar year (thankfully he’s finally put together a string of at least decent games in a row after his save percentage was like .860 forever), culminating with the aforementioned disaster against Tampa at home where he was jeered off the ice.

Even with his recent improvement, you can’t really trust the guy long-term to A) stay healthy, and B) re-find his game immediately after coming back from injury-related absences and now we have to walk that tightrope for another 2.5 seasons. Forget about ever giving Nico Daws a chance or any other young goalie for that matter, we can’t have that. There were even rumors of poor Nico mulling a KHL offer, before turning it down.

Even that’s become trivial now given what was to follow, much of it centering around the Hughes clan (and that’s even before getting to last night). Luke’s preseason holdout set him back the way Mercer’s did last year though to be honest, it’s not like he was playing all that great at the end of last season either. Still, he held out before he got his $9 million a year and then has been dreadful for large chunks of this season. Do I think he got his money and stopped caring, no – clearly he does if you saw that reaction of him on the bench earlier in the season after missing a goal needing to get calmed down by big brother Jack…but he also still has a maturity issue that isn’t helped by the fact the organization clearly caters to both brothers. I’ll get to that more later.

Speaking of Jack…in a lot of ways the most annoying thing from the first half of the season came when he somehow sliced open his finger at a team dinner. Not knowing the details (I’m not sure if I buy the team’s state media version of it just being an unfortunate accident without alcohol or roughhousing involved), and even if you want to give Jack the benefit of the doubt, the fact is he has missed time in multiple seasons now. And he can no longer clap back at reporters like he did earlier in the season when he was questioned about his recent injury record. Sure, a guy checking him into the boards is one thing a la Jack Eichel last year but he did this one to himself, and the team’s downturn largely coincided with his exiting the lineup…not that it’s been helped by his return since though.

Oh and let’s not forget the saga over the Hughes brother that isn’t even here…the Quinn trade rumors finally came to a head in mid-December when the Wild (in Quinn’s words) ‘sacked up’ and traded for him, conveniently right before we were set to play the Canucks at home in what could have been an awkward situation for everyone involved.

What’s annoying isn’t even so much that we didn’t get him, it’s that we couldn’t even entertain the notion of getting him because Fitz had made a cap mess so deep he couldn’t possibly beg his way out of it. This goes back in part to his hair-trigger panic signing of Jonathan Kovacevic last year after he had a good first half of the season, and Nemec had a poor first half coming off of injury. Since then, Kovacevic’s play dipped in the second half, he got injured and is now just about ready to come off the injured list, further complicating an already messy cap situation. Even if you wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt on signing Kovacevic, it’s not ideal to have so many defensemen already making big money with Luke’s extension imminent, and part of why Fitz’s panicked, reactionary GM’ing has led to him being up against a wall now.

It also came out in the wake of the failed Quinn trade, that Fitz had asked at least one player to waive his no-trade and was rebuffed. Reading between the lines (i.e. him not denying it when directly asked about it), it seems that player was Dougie Hamilton – who’s also the highest paid defenseman on the team with Luke. Do I blame Hamilton for nixing a trade, no I do not…what I do blame him for is dude, if you want to be here then at least give effort. He’s spent much of the first half of the season floating and committing penalties, without the dynamic offensive gifts of the past that might have at least canceled out some of that. Dougie’s situation might be the closest parallel to 2010-11 I can make, since it’s eerily reminiscent of Jamie Langenbrunner being asked to waive a no-trade, then skating around the first half of the season in who cares mode. At least act like you want to be here, or do us all a favor and waive for a team that wants you. Just being in who cares mode, ole’ing the greatest goalscorer in history is just embarrassing and doesn’t help anyone.

Of course it would be Dougie that was asked to waive his NTC because Ondrej Palat’s production for his money has been so bad basically from the minute he signed his deal that it’s not even worth it to try to attach a pick to get rid of him IF he even waived his own NMC, he’ll likely be a buyout at the end of this season with one year left on his deal and a spectacularly bad free agent signing, with not even one good season among the four he’s played here. At least he’s tried, I’ll say that much for him but given the fact he was lauded for veteran leadership, I haven’t exactly seen that at all from him here given how disappointing this franchise has been for the better part of three years now.

He’s just another guy who doesn’t rock the boat and get in people’s faces, we have too many of them here including the captain and head coach. Which is why it stands out when someone actually does, like Jack in the Capitals game – the same one as that Ovechkin goal above – when he called the team out after giving up a last-second goal in the first period…only to have a careless turnover in front of his own net, leading to a three on the goalie goal less than twenty minutes later. At least he tried, but holy heck what a way to self-own. It took one of the newest Devils – Connor Brown – to lay into the team after a typically deadass two periods at Columbus on New Year’s Eve, that finally seemed to wake them up in a three-goal explosion in the third period, followed by an impressive win (at home no less!) against Utah on Saturday where for a hot moment it seemed as if maybe we were a game away from getting back on track here…too bad it was against the dreaded Canes.

Now we can get to last night and the impetus for this post (well actually two nights ago now by the time I finish this since I’ve already gone over midnight and will now finish the rest of this off tomorrow morning)…

First things first, no I wasn’t in the building for the Canes game – it’s been hard to get motivated to even watch this team anymore, much less go to the games. My only attended games all of December were two fiascoes I’ve already alluded to, the 8-4 loss to Tampa Bay with Markstrom hitting rock bottom and a 4-3 OT loss to the Caps where basically every goal was caused by someone’s catastrophic mistake. If it wasn’t Jack giving up a 3-on-0 or Dougie watching Ovechkin shoot the puck by him it was Jonas Siegenthaler committing the cardinal sin of trying to play the puck in the last five seconds of a period rather than just eating it at the boards, turning it over as the Caps scored a goal with less than a second remaining. Fittingly, the game ended in OT on a Luke mistake when he tried to force the puck to Paul Cotter, who was covered and wound up springing the breakout the other way that proved decisive.

Even that wasn’t as mind-numbingly stupid as what he pulled Sunday night though. I didn’t have any inkling what happened until I saw this Tweet from Kristy Flannery alluding to it:

The fans in attendance here are voicing their displeasure every time #NJDevils Luke Hughes touches the puck. It's been a rough night for the 22-year-old.

— Kristy Flannery (@InStilettos_NHL) January 5, 2026

Shocked that our fans actually targeted anyone much less a popular kid, I immediately had to suss out what happened on a message board and when I heard Luke had scored TWO own goals, I was like…really? Did he get drunk with holiday cheer or something? I was expecting maybe he deflected one in and had one bounce off him but the actual highlights were far worse. Now you can’t help but think in this age if there’s going to be a FanDuel burner account investigation, the second one in particular was actually that bad. Technically it might not have been an own goal but he more or less did hand it to Taylor Hall (ironically) on a silver platter, skating basically from the blueline to the front of his own net while Hall trailed him like a shark, then pounced to finish off the goal.

Going from 1-0 up to 2-1 down entirely because of Luke’s cavalier carelessness – eventually becoming a 3-1 loss – seemed to be the final straw that made the crowd snap and boo him the rest of the night every time he touched the puck. Oh, it’s been building…the crowd finally turning on Markstrom against Tampa was a tell, and certainly in the Caps game you could feel it when the team was booed off the ice after a first period that wasn’t even that bad, but Siegenthaler’s bonehead play ruined it for everyone. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a Devils skater (non-goalie) targeted for wrath of the crowd though, certainly not to this degree. Even Ilya Kovalchuk in 2010 – yikes, another 2010 comparison – wasn’t getting it quite this bad, it was almost comical when they had Happy Thanksgiving messages on the jumbotron and Kovalchuk was booed there.

While I didn’t get the annoyance of seeing these plays in live time, or the totality of the defeat, I did have my eyes firmly rolling at the reaction afterward where the coach, players and team personnel put more effort into backing Luke off the ice than they’ve done for a lot of actual games in recent weeks.

Nico Hischier speaking on a day he wasn’t scheduled to just to offer Luke support was portrayed as some grand gesture on Twitter, in some ways that’s a perfect encapsulation of the problems around here. Nico is a nice kid and to be fair that’s something you should do as a captain for a teammate, but also maybe things don’t even get to this point if Nico and others had come down on Luke beforehand – not like Sunday’s the first time he’s played poorly and made lazy, braindead mistakes, they were just the most obvious examples for all to see. Perhaps if the team tried to self-police the garbage they’ve been putting out on the ice, the crowd wouldn’t have been compelled to do it themselves on Sunday.

Do I think the crowd went too far? Yes, I do agree with Mike Rupp and others when they say booing the first shift was fine, after that it just became counterproductive. I’m pretty sure I would have done just that if I was there (booed only the first shift), but why was Luke even still out there shift after shift in the first place? That’s where if you actually had a strong coach, Luke would be sitting down at least through intermission but Keefe, like the rest of this organization is too soft to really go after the golden boy players. And Keefe even mocked the suggestion in the postgame that he should have benched Luke, like really dude? I know your roster is limited – despite being mostly healthy now – but sometimes you have to make a point for the greater good, and sometimes a kid just needs to reset. You could argue for either of those to have been the case, and that’s all the more why not benching Luke for even a single shift was arguably just as annoying as his braindead mistakes.

To a degree I do feel like the crowd was over the top harsh on Luke – which included dumb bronx cheers when he tried to skate through the entire Carolina defense and got put on his backside – because he conveniently put the target on his back in front of everyone and inadvertently took a bullet for the whole organization, not like he’s the only one who’s been a disappointment (far from it) although the fact he held out getting a new contract when we have cap issues doesn’t help either. At this point I feel like the GM is the one who should be getting the fans’ ire for causing and putting a lot of this mess together, hopefully he’ll get his soon enough.

I don’t feel bad for Luke in any case, maybe this was the kick in the ass he needed and wasn’t ever going to get from a pathetically soft locker room. Just the audacity of him saying he’s played pretty good hockey this year shows that there’s been no critical feedback at all until Sunday when the fans did it for the staff and the team. Not that anyone else gets it from the team either other than maybe a kid like Nemec, he’d have been sent to Siberia if he pulled what Luke did last night. We know they won’t do crap about Douglas’s floating nonsense – he just keeps leading the blueline in icetime night after night.

Things must change on and off the ice, and in a hurry before changes are eventually forced on them. Firing another coach and/or finally banishing some underperforming players won’t fix the root issue of there being a lack of in-house discipline. This team’s fast on pace to miss the playoffs for a second time in three years after 2022-23 was supposed to be a signal of the Devils becoming the next great force in the league. While I’m down on Keefe right now clearly it’s not just a coach problem at this point – heck, look at Lindy Ruff in Buffalo, they can’t lose a game since they canned their rubbish GM and enforced some form of accountability for years of losing. Maybe he wasn’t ever the problem here after all.

Does make you wonder what would happen if we also canned our own rubbish GM (and actually replaced him with an outsider, not just another in-house promotion)…