Devils Ring In New Year With Troubling Old Habits
In several ways, the Devils’ end to the 2024 calendar year was reminiscent of how it began.
After coming back from a 2-0 deficit in the third period at Anaheim on New Year’s Eve, New Jersey blew a game to an inferior opponent despite boasting a heavy shot attempt disparity because their goalie allowed a late game-winning goal from distance in a 3-2 defeat.
Sound familiar?
The 2023-24 Devils would find ways to lose. The excuses ran the gamut. Bad luck with goal posts and bounces. Bad officiating. Out-goalie’d. The last time the Devils visited the Honda Center on March 1, Ducks netminder Lukas Dostal made 52 saves and watched Devils star Jack Hughes mishandle a penalty shot with 2 seconds remaining to salvage a 4-3 decision for one of the worst clubs in the league.
Hockey, with its low margin for error that amplifies mistakes and missed opportunities, is the epitome of the old quote, “The world doesn’t want to hear about labor pains; it only wants to see the baby.” Did you win or lose? The nuanced explanations are fine for individual games, but when it becomes a pattern…
This Devils iteration vowed to re-write the flawed script. For the most part, they sacrificed a little bit of offensive creativity in the name of defensive discipline. The goaltending, thanks to the offseason trade for Jacob Markstrom, was keeping the club in games. Their fourth-best points percentage in the NHL at 24-12-3 going into Tuesday night was well-deserved.
But there are warning signs. Tuesday’s loss was New Jersey’s fifth this season to a team that would need a miracle to qualify for the playoffs (Note: I didn’t count the whitewashings by sub-.500 Calgary and St. Louis). Though top-four defensemen Luke Hughes and Brett Pesce missed all of training camp through the season’s first nine contests and a few bottom-six forwards have gone down for a period, the team’s core personnel has been remarkably healthy through the first 40 games (knock on wood), especially when compared to last season’s injury plague that sent the campaign off the rails. The good health has been critical for a club that relies so heavily on its big guns for scoring.
If the season’s mission in your eyes is for the Devils to simply qualify for the Stanley Cup tournament, the first half has been very satisfying. However, let’s not mistake this for the young team with abundant salary cap flexibility of the past. General Manager Tom Fitzgerald built this team to win now, so the bar for success must be raised.
The Devils’ home-and-home split with Carolina prior to the West Coast trip that continues on Wednesday in Los Angeles (prepare for a grind) was instructive in that regard. Fitzgerald has reimagined his squad with the Hurricanes, who defeated New Jersey in five games in the 2023 Eastern Conference semifinals, in mind. Still, despite all of Fitzgerald’s upgrades, there remains little separation between the two Metropolitan Division rivals who, if the season ended on Tuesday, would meet in the first round.
That’s why banking as many points as possible against the lower tier is crucial for the Devils’ playoff prospects. Unfortunately, their talent superiority too often leads to treating these opponents disrespectfully. It always seems like the Devils are more prone to an unacceptable number of odd-man rushes allowed, loosey-goosey turnovers in dangerous areas, and semi-soft goals surrendered against the bottom-feeders as opposed to the better teams where they know they have to be dialed in on the details. And then when the opposing goalie stands on his head like Dostal did in Tuesday’s first period…boom, you get the bad result,
Just like at the beginning of 2024.