It’s Thanksgiving in the United States, often considered a significant benchmark for how teams have fared through the first quarter of the season, and an alarmingly accurate predictor of who will ultimately make the playoffs in April. Since the 05-06 season, 76.3% of the teams in a playoff position by Thanksgiving, have gone on to make the dance.
The Devils better hope to buck history, in that case.
Because through 17 games, this team is officially AVERAGE, and mostly just really shitty recently. The kids these days would refer to this team as MID, or so I’m told.
So, WTF is going on?
Well, the team has obviously dealt with some significant injuries – Hischier, Hughes, Meier, Colin Miller & Tomas Nosek at varying points.
To have Hughes & Hischier out at the same time, the club’s top two players and both center icemen, would be a tall task for any team to overcome. Add a third injury to arguably the Devils best forward not named Hughes or Hischier in Timo Meier, and depth starts to wear thin.
But as a fan and consumer of Devils hockey this season, it’s not the injuries that concern me. Nor has it been the primary contributor to their recent skid.
Quite simply: the Devils are not playing the right way. That may sound over-simplified, but here’s what I mean more specifically – the Devils have played soft. They are weak defensively. And not just the defensemen, but as a the team, the defense has been weak. The goaltending has been below average. There has been very little commitment to ‘process-oriented’ hockey. There has been a major lack of toughness.
There is no ‘identity’ for this team as it stands right now. A whisper of one from last season still exists, but it’s not there consistently at current.
And to add insult to injury, I don’t think Lindy & the coaching staff have been pushing the right buttons.
Much was made by the media and the fan base recently with Alexander Holtz seemingly unable to break free of Lindy’s ironclad doghouse, despite his best asset being his scoring prowess while the team floundered without its top offensive players.
While Holtz has since started to receive more opportunity, it was a head scratcher at the time.
Most recently, Colin Miller has made his way into the lineup for the first time this season and has looked like a real breath of fresh air on the back end. Specifically, he has looked like a fitting compliment to Luke Hughes and a step in the right direction for a defensive unit that has been weak, soft, turnover prone, and uninspiring.
Chief amongst those uninspiring players has been Brendan Smith – however, rather than giving Miller the minutes he seemingly deserves and providing the backend a new look, Ruff has maintained Smith in the lineup and opted to go 11/7 the last handful of games.
Personally – I hate the 11/7, and if you ask any of the defensemen in an 11/7 lineup, they would likely tell you the same thing. It’s also not a long-term fix for success.
What makes it worse is that the ‘7th’ guy in Brendan Smith is not contributing much to warrant the alternative lineup in the first place.
And when a team simply looks flat over a consistent stretch – slow to coverage, soft in all three zones, lacking snarl and jump, while there needs to be accountability on the players, the coaching staff shouldn’t be blameless either. That type of play can sometimes be the result of players being checked out on a coach or staff.
I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here – but again, clearly the right buttons have not been pushed.
Not to go all Don Cherry on this post, but I think there is truth in the correlation between team toughness and success. Look no further than the Vegas Golden Knights and Florida Panthers, who battled for the Stanley Cup last season.
Both of those teams play a junkyard-dog type of game, and more importantly, they are both united groups that stick up for each other and don’t get pushed around. You saw the same type of unity and toughness from the recently successful Tampa Bay Lightning teams. Mark Stone got ran in preseason this year and the rest of the Knights went to war for their captain. Meanwhile, Nico takes a headshot against Buffalo and there’s virtually no reaction.
Often, this is a missing ingredient for an otherwise talented, high-end team. See exhibit A: the Toronto Maple Leafs over the last many years. Full of high-end talent, but without a ton of snarl or team toughness.
I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to say this Devils team lacks that element. Being viewed as a soft, easy team to play against spells major trouble. That’s how liberties get taken, that’s how you lose the respect of your opponent, and that’s how you lose games and unravel.
I have no bad things to say about Michael McLeod, who in my opinion has become virtually the most consistent hard working player on the Devils roster – you know exactly what you’re getting from him ever night and it’s an honest, gritty effort.
There are, however, quite a few others on the team that need to do more as role players. Guys like Nate Bastian, Kevin Bahl, Tomas Nosek, Curtis Lazar (who has provided some offense recently, I will concede), Onrej Palat, and Erik Haula need to bring a little more snarl and make this a harder team to play against.
But it’s really a commitment from everyone, to help shape an identity. Dougie Hamilton plays like a teddy bear, despite being a mountain of a man. Tyler Toffoli, despite how great he’s been as a goal scorer, has a gritty and nasty side to his game that has been totally absent since joining this team.
I mentioned being wary of overreactions in my last post which was 4 games in. But now that we’re 17 in and the same bullshit has plagued this team, I do believe it is time to “officially” worry.
It’s Black Friday and the Devils get a silver platter “get-right” matchup at home against the Columbus Blue Jackets who are without a few key players and dealing with major issues themselves.
Time to wake the fuck up and right the ship. I think I speak for the majority of Devils fans currently experiencing more than a little anxiety and bad nostalgia from the not-so-distant years of irrelevance and despair, and we could all use a nice little stretch of good hockey to help quell those terrible thoughts.
Outside of world class beautician Jack Hughes, I’m looking at a Tyler Toffoli & Erik Haula gritty, veteran effort to spark this group.
Let’s Go Devils.
Word Of The Devil 