Devils Coach Next Season Shouldn’t Be A Ruff Call
According to ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski, the odds that the Devils will keep Lindy Ruff as their head coach for next season are close to 50/50, as if management needs more time to evaluate consecutive bottom-five finishes in the 32-team NHL.
As New Jersey limps into its final two games of the 2021-22 campaign, there should be no doubt about what has to be done by the weekend: Lindy must leave.
The firing should have been taken care of earlier this season, most obviously when the Devils (27-44-9) were getting thrashed on a nearly nightly basis in January. Yet General Manager Tom Fitzgerald opted to let Ruff ride out the season, the ninth in the last ten where the team has failed to qualify for the playoffs.
Blame horrid goaltending all you want, but this team is still a mess in its own zone and has been erratic at best on special teams. The Devils league-most 14 shorthanded goals against is an abomination.
What was Wyshynski’s reasoning for running it back with Ruff next season? Well, young players Jesper Bratt, Jack Hughes, and Nico Hischier (and I’d throw in Yegor Sharangovich) all had productive seasons.
Sure, let’s cherry-pick the good ones. What about Pavel Zacha, Mike MacLeod, and Ty Smith, all former first-round picks? Doesn’t their development slides/plateaus count?
Smith, who might as well have been a pylon on Drake Batherson’s overtime game-winner in Ottawa’s 5-4 victory on Tuesday, was far from the Devils’ only defenseman who has had a suboptimal year, to say the least. Even high-priced free agent signee Dougie Hamilton has looked like a shell of his former play-driving self since returning from a broken jaw two months ago, with just 2 goals and 7 assists in his last 30 games. New Jersey’s only reliable backliners this season were Damon Severson and Jonas Siegenthaler, and that’s only when the former had the puck on his stick and the latter didn’t.
The recent wave of prospect call-ups has been fun to watch, but it’s not like it’s having a major positive impact on the results—the Devils have lost six of their last seven games. What good is having a grandfatherly-type coach behind the bench offering words of encouragement if there’s so little tangible progress?
Whether or not the league has passed the 62-year old Ruff by is not for me to say. He obviously knows the game and offers the same analysis that all other losing NHL coaches say after games: “We need better puck management”, “We have to be better at getting inside position”, etc.
He knows what’s wrong. The team has more talent this season than most other recent iterations boasted. When the same mistakes keep happening night-after-night, it has to be the system.
I get that Fitzgerald is close with Ruff personally, which could be why he was chosen over superior coaches such as current Rangers coach Gerard Gallant two summers ago. However, Fitzgerald can’t be blinded by the Devils’ league-worst .887 save percentage and think that’s all that’s wrong. According to analytics experts who study things like goals allowed over expected, the Devils still wouldn’t have qualified for the postseason even if they had average goaltending.
Fitzgerald will have a lot on his plate this offseason, with some of the decisions—like how much to pay restricted free agent Bratt and where to find a new starting goalie—expected to be on the challenging side.
The coaching evaluation, on the other hand, should be quick and easy. If you want to change a losing culture, you can’t bring back a coach who has nearly the same record of futility (two playoff appearances in the last 11 seasons, including three years as a Rangers assistant) as the team you’re trying to fix.