Everything is fair game right now. In a week where the New Jersey Devils were poised to make an urgent climb up the standings with four games in six days, three in a row at home, the team fizzled, earning just two of eight possible points. They mustered just eight total goals across the four games, finishing the run with a measly three shots in the most crucial third period of the season and losing significant ground in the process. While a run to the playoffs, a la the 1987-88 Devils, may still be possible, this team has not shown any signs that they belong among the 16 teams still playing at the close of the regular season. If the effort and lack of attention to detail this week is any indicator, Devils fans won’t have to make plans to be in Newark in May.
The Devils entered the season with a bullseye squarely imprinted on their back. Gone were the days of sneaking up on teams who were in town to play the New York Rangers and bullying backup goalies. The team’s success last season guaranteed that games against New Jersey would be circled on their opponents’ calendars. At the start of the season, the team appeared unwilling to shoulder that burden. With injuries and losses mounting, they functioned in survival mode lacking cohesion from game to game. As the season unraveled due to injury and inconsistency, the front office set the tone of lack of urgency by failing to act.
Missing were any moves to shore up deficiencies in goal or on the blue line, rather general manager Tom Fitzgerald seemed to take a wait-and-see approach, hoping that once healthy they would go on a tear when he could have instead taken a flyer on players on waivers or free agents that would not have cost the team assets. Unfortunately for the Devils, they wouldn’t get close to completely healthy until mid-February when they were on the outside of the playoff picture. Fostering that inactivity set a tone for this team from which it has not recovered, and the failure to improve the roster in December and January is likely to have cost them the playoffs.
Lacking Desperation
By the time the final horn rang out in the Prudential Center Sunday afternoon, a small group of hardy fans who stuck it out until the bitter end could be heard alternating between boos and a now familiar “fire Lindy” chant. The commentary from the crowd was remarkable not for the cacophony, but for the apathy demonstrated by the fans that matched the play of the team. The half-hearted chorus of boos was more a signal of the fans’ dismay at being duped into believing that this weekend would be different from the brutal losses to the Rangers and Washington Capitals earlier in the week. The Devils escaped the Montreal Canadiens because of timely goals by Nico Hischier and Jesper Bratt after struggling all game to keep up with a team amid a rebuild. Sunday, they played a carbon copy of Saturday’s game; unfortunately for them, it came against a team with championship pedigree who locked down the game after taking a two-goal, third-period lead.
Related: Tom Fitzgerald at an Inflection Point in His Devils Tenure
With everything on the line Sunday, the Devils players again failed to leave it all on the ice. Continuing to make crucial defensive coverage errors led to the early goals for the Tampa Bay Lightning, who were never seriously threatened after taking the 2-0 lead. The Devils only mustered three shots on goal in the third period. Three shots, despite being gifted two power plays in the first five minutes of the period when they only trailed by one. During the final power play, they held the puck in the offensive zone for nearly 90 seconds and failed to even register a shot on goal. The lack of desperation shown by the team was palpable leaving anyone who watched the game to wonder whether the coach has lost the room or there are issues with chemistry. The game was more reminiscent of a mid-November matinee than a late February tilt against the team right above you in the wild card standings.
Out of Answers
Tyler Toffoli was the only Devils veteran made available to the media after the game on Sunday. He chose to give credit to the Lightning rather than address his team’s lack of desperation in such a crucial contest. When asked about their lack of urgency in the third, the winger said, “They (Tampa) did a good job blocking shots. We had some good looks on the power play and didn’t cash in and that was, I think, kind of the difference maker in the third period.” When pressed, he doubled down on the notion that Tampa was a team that had championship pedigree and knew what it took to win games like these. He felt the Lightning, “play(ed) well defensively. You know, they’ve won, they’re champions. They have a lot of those guys over there, so they know what to do and how to win games, and obviously, they did a better job of playing the game today than we did.”
Head coach Lindy Ruff did not shy away from taking full responsibility for the team’s performance during the entire season. He chose not to be as critical of his team as he was after the Rangers game, but from the looks of the line combinations and goalie rotation, he has done about as much as he can with the current 23-man roster.
“I take full responsibility. You want to win, we’ve dealt with a lot. The players want to win. I’m responsible for the wins and losses and who gets on the ice who doesn’t get on the ice. I said this before, we got a passionate, we got a very passionate fan base. They want to see wins. You know I think again in a back to back and if you look at our home record, that part hurts. So I feel fully responsible.”
– Devils’ head coach Lindy Ruff
At some point, the question has to shift to roster construction and whether Fitzgerald gave his coach enough to work with while the team dealt with major injuries and league-worst goaltending.
Too Little, Too Late
Four of the five highest-paid Devils have all missed more than ten games this season due to injury. As Ruff said after the Lightning game, “We’ve dealt with a lot.” He isn’t wrong. While the team was struggling to find its footing, the mantra continued to be, ‘wait until everyone is back.’ Now that everyone is back (other than Dougie Hamilton) it appears to be too late for the team to find consistency and make a run. With his star players heading to the injured list in droves, Fitzgerald chose to only resupply his coach with assets from within rather than aggressively add to his roster to keep the team afloat. Did he sense early on that it was a lost year and his team was not going to reach the playoffs and chose to pack it in, or did he overvalue what he had within the organization? Neither bodes well for the team.
Pair the injury issues with goaltending that was among the worst in the NHL for the entire season, and the year quickly spiraled into unforeseen disaster territory. Fitzgerald experienced something similar two years ago when Hamilton and Jack Hughes missed extended periods of time and he lost all of his NHL-caliber goaltenders to injury. In that season, he made several moves trying to acquire goaltending help including adding Jon Gillies and the “Hamburglar” Andrew Hammond, setting a franchise record for most goalies used in a season. He said he made the moves because he felt the team deserved that effort. Last season, without the catastrophic injuries and with above-average goaltending, the Devils shot to third in the NHL. It begs the question when the wheels began to come off, why didn’t he make any moves other than claiming defenseman Nick Desimone, who still has not played a game, did this team not deserve better?
The time for action was December and January when the goaltenders were floundering and the coach was forced to ice career bottom-six players in the top six and career minor league journeymen in the top nine. Those lost points counted as much as the ones lost this weekend and were salvageable. The Carolina Hurricanes faced similar issues in goal and actively attempted to upgrade their situation even if it was just incrementally. They attempted to sign Jaroslav Halak after a professional tryout and claimed Spencer Martin off of waivers from Columbus, both moves that were available to the Devils, yet Fitzgerald stood pat. Rumors swirled that the Devils instead took big swings attempting to pry Jacob Markstrom from the Calgary Flames, but were unsuccessful, and the team has been forced to rely on rookie Nico Daws in net for seven consecutive games less than nine months from major hip surgery.
The truth is right now the Devils are primed to be sellers at the deadline with one huge asset in Toffoli and a few lesser, but valuable assets in Colin Miller, Tomas Nosek, and Brendan Smith, all veteran unrestricted free agents at the end of the season with playoff pedigrees. Team management will likely try to chalk up the disappointment to injuries, youth, and the tough lessons teams have to learn on the way to championships. While these are certainly factors in the team’s season of decline, there is a broader story to tell and the inaction of the Devils’ front office deserves its own chapter.
Entering the season, Devils fans were split on many issues: Ruff’s coaching, the team’s grit, whether Vitek Vanecek could rebound from the playoffs and others. One issue that united the fanbase was the track record of success Fitzgerald had displayed in team building; fans took to calling him “Tom Fleecegerald” because they were so bullish on his moves. Now almost 60 games into the season, the goodwill and benefit of the doubt he enjoyed just four months ago is waning. Taking a wide view of his moves over the last three seasons and the inability to fix the goaltending issue, fans have become concerned and the most concerning part has to be watching recent history continue to repeat itself and the team appearing to not have learned from the past.
