Battle Of Hudson

After sleeping off last night’s roller-coaster shootout loss to the rival Islanders there’s plenty I want to get to this morning…about the winless Devils, petty fans/management and other random home opener thoughts.  As I usually do in these blogs though I’ll go in chronological order so I’ll start with when I arrived in Newark around 5:30.  Despite Thursday’s game with the Penguins, my fandom kicked in and I was excited anew for the home opener.  Although yesterday was bizarre summer weather that you wouldn’t expect at the opening of a hockey season – I was wearing shorts for crying out loud!  I don’t usually get there so early for a 7 PM start but I had an unscheduled day off yesterday anyway so figured I might as well enjoy the atmosphere a little longer.  Especially since I had things to do like trying to find my free brick inscription in Championship Plaza, get my season ticket holder lanyard and eat dinner with my food/beverage card.  As well as seeing how many people I know that I could find in and around the arena…and I did meet up with a couple of people I knew outside but couldn’t find my brick – with a couple thousand bricks and at least a hundred people around looking for their own I figured it’d be a fruitless task anyway so I shelved it.

I went inside just after 6 to get my ticket lanyard which I’ll probably never use anyway (though as I pointed out to someone later it’s useful if you’re going into  your section with food, so you don’t have to grab the ticket out of your pocket), then went towards section 10 to see my two sth buddies down there during warmups.  One of them told me she didn’t get anything from the Devils that she was supposed to – either her food/beverage card or her RSVP to the season ticket holder barbeque/meet and greet at the Prudential Center last week.  I was lucky enough to go but I had to e-mail and ask for the RSVP link.  Then I didn’t get my ticket that I was supposed to print out so I had to ask for one at the arena and hope they had me on the list.  I suppose it’s inevitable with ownership changes and the restructuring of the sales department (having eight ticket reps now instead of three) some things are going to fall through the cracks.  Kristi didn’t get her lanyard either, I told her just to do it during an intermission because the line was too long now but she did try the line after warmups – don’t know whether she and her brother eventually got theirs though.  Funny that the first song in warmups was ‘The Boys Are Back’ from Dropkick Murphys, which happens to be one of the songs in NHL14 but also fits as an opening song.  Apparently Danius Zubrus (who moonlights as the team dj) is a better judge of picking songs than the team itself…more on that soon.

After warmups I went upstairs, I was going to text my former sth buddy in 120 and ask where he was at the game since we used to sit in the same row the previous two seasons but he said he was giving up his tickets last year because he hated the people around 120.  I figured he would be at the opener but literally just before I was going to contact Rudy I saw him on one of the food lines.  Much to my surprise he renewed for the same seats (I figured he’d switch them during the seat relocation event if nothing else) and told me it was mostly about the Winter Classic and getting those tickets.  So guess the cliche is true about having events like the Winter Classic – or the All-Star Game for Met fans this past year – being a goose for season tickets.  Oh well, glad he and his girlfriend are back and the moron who sat behind me last year was missing last night.  So that was one positive.

The ‘We Are…JERSEY!’ motto of this year was all right though I can see myself getting bored of that very quickly.  Can’t say I’m surprised though, New Jersey’s only pro sports team, or at least the only one unafraid to use NJ in marketing is going to play to the home crowd, which is fine by me.  And they did it in more ways than one…but sometimes it backfired badly.  Which leads to the night’s biggest contreversy of all – the Devils’ new goal song.  If you’re a Devils fan or even any local fan that’s been to the Prudential Center or the CAA before that, you know Rock and Roll Part II has generally been the goal song, other than a year or so where the Devils took it away, ostensibly because songwriter Gary Glitter was still getting royatlies in prison.  Protests – and an adjustment to how royalties were paid out – eventually led to the song coming back, but not everyone likes the ‘You Suck’ part of it at the end, starting with many in Devils management and some fans on message boards (none of whom apparently go to games since everyone at games partakes in the song).  Not for any good reason imo, people on message boards complain it’s low-class but let’s face it, I’ve heard far more vile things on a nightly basis than ‘Team X sucks’ anyway.  The other explantion I hear for why some fans don’t like it is ‘well everyone does it when we’re down three goals in the third period’.  So don’t do it yourself…why should other fans’ goofiness bother you?  In my mind so long as someone isn’t doing something like starting fights/getting violent or screaming nonsense in your ear all night long you should be able to deal with it.

Rock and Roll Part 2 was still used as the goal song in the preseason, so unless you read message boards or happened to catch beat guy Tom Gulutti‘s aside in the comments section of one of his blogs you would have had no idea the song was changing this year. So when Damien Brunner scored the team’s first goal of the season at 2:59 of the first period I was bemused but not surprised when I heard Bon Jovi‘s ‘This Is Our House’ playing.  After the initial shock came almost instantenous boos.  Boos that were only exacerbated because quite honestly, the song sucks as a goal song.  Just like the Devils did when they used some Jersey band’s (the Bouncing Souls) crappy knockoff of Ole a few years ago, they again tried to go with the whole ‘pick a Jersey artist’s song for the sake of having a Jersey guy do the goal song’ without any real common sense attached to it.  Not to mention since we ARE Jersey fans we aren’t going to like anyone telling us what we can and can’t chant over songs.  Make no mistake about it, R&R Part 2 was removed because of the ‘You Suck’ aspect of it, no other reason.  Still, there’s no excuse for sneak bombing the fans like that – especially a fanbase that had to deal with a lockout, a horrendous 2/3 of a short season and the best player leaving the country in the offseason.  If there was ever a wrong fight, wrong time it’s the one Devils management’s picking with the fans.

There’s no excuse for the fans’ reaction last night though – with the boos only getting louder after the goal song started on the subsequent two goals we scored last night, especially after the team tried in vein to turn up the music on the goals to drown out the boos.  What the fans did last night was akin to a five-year old throwing a tantrum because he didn’t get ice cream.  I could understand the boos after the first one, I understand the concept of making your voice heard but you know what – leave the team and the game on the ice out of your silly, selfish protests.  That game last night became more about the fans’ selfishness in the stands (and the team’s pigheadedness in trying to sneak through a change like this and thinking nothing was going to happen) than the team on the ice. With a two-week break until our next home game it’ll be interesting to see how the team reacts to the boos last night and the inevitable protests on Twitter, Facebook and via e-mail and the phone that they’ve already heard and are still to come.

As far as the game itself, while it was better than Thursday from the aspect we actually scored goals – the defensive breakdowns were alarmingly prevalent even more than against the Penguins.  It seemed as if every second shift Michael Grabner was getting behind our defense, most of the time Adam Larsson who looked like he didn’t belong in the NHL last night and was benched late in the game for the most part.  Some ill-timed pinches by Anton Volchenkov (though one of his pinches did actually lead to goal #3, a deflection in front by Brunner for his second of the night) led to Peter Harrold again playing the Lone Ranger a couple of times back on two-on-ones for the second straight game.  Marek Zidlicky had his second consecutive bad game offensively and defensively, although at least he shot with an open net last night, it didn’t go anywhere close to in. And yes the offense did score although the offense was mostly Brunner – who had a nifty deflection on his initial goal – and fortunate bounces on the other two goals, with a rebound from a weak Bryce Salvador shot landing on the stick of an open Michael Ryder in the second period, and Volchenkov’s knuckleball in the third period deflecting off an Islander right to Brunner in front.  For the second straight game, goaltending was less than perfect with Martin Brodeur giving up a shortside bad-angle shot to Grabner in the second period though granted he beat Larsson to the outside that time too, though that wasn’t as bad for Larsson as when Grabner hit the turbo switch on NHL14 and just flat blew by him up the middle in the first period for his first goal.  Amazingly the Isles scored three times with the John Tavares-Matt Moulson line doing nothing.  As the game went to OT I was actually dreading what a PR disaster boos after a Devil OT goal would create, but that never happened so we went to a dreaded shootout.

Dreaded because let’s face it, the shootout aces we once had – Zach Parise, Brian Gionta, Viktor Kozlov and even Ilya Kovalchuk for one season are now all gone.  I never would have guessed Ryane Clowe had over 40 career attempts in the shootout before coming here, or that he was one of our (three) shooters that was so much as above 30% career, with Patrik Elias and Travis Zajac being the others.  Our shootout attempts were painful to watch for the most part though, we made Evgeni Nabokov‘s job look easy in the skills competition.  Brunner-Clowe-Elias-Zajac-Ryder and Jaromir Jagr all got stopped with little problem.  Fortunately Brodeur started to warm up during the third period and was locked in for his part of the shootout, stopping Frans Nielsen, Pierre-Marc Bouchard and Tavares to get into extra ‘innings’.  As Brodeur also stopped Josh Bailey and Kyle Okposo I found myself saying out loud ‘where the (heck) is Grabner?!’.  I’m not even an Isles fan but I was shocked they didn’t put him out, but looking at the stats this morning apparently Grabner’s never even taken a shootout attempt.  They also left Matt Moulson – career 6/13 going into last night until way late in the rotation but when he finally got his chance he scored the game-winner.

My only consolation after was I actually found my sth brick after the game, looking around for another few minutes while I was with my friends that I saw earlier outside (one couple in 103, another who usually sit in the lower bowl) in Championship Plaza before we walked to our cars.  However I wound up on the wrong end of the highway for a few minutes getting lost and my old GPS wouldn’t work at first so I had to turn it off and on before it finally kicked in.  Between the OT, the long walk out afterward (going out the wrong gate and with the crowd waiting to get the post-game puck giveaway) and my mistake on the highway I didn’t get home till after 11, which is unheard of for a 7 PM game for me.  At least I have Saturday-Monday off as well, though Monday night will be more sports agida for me between the Jets’ expected beatdown in Atlanta and the Devils’ almost life and death game against the Oilers.  Make no mistake, these games are crucial. With Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa on the docket before we come home again for the Rangers on the 19th the schedule doesn’t get any easier until maybe early/mid November.  If the team can at least go 2-2-1 on the trip and win the Ranger game then at least they can tread water for a while until the new forwards can get acclimated to the system and the old ones start scoring, but if not it could get ugly circa ’10-11 early.