The Devils have floundered in their last decade of existence as a franchise. In what? Well, most things, except winning the draft lottery and occasionally getting applause for his offseason moves. It’s been a tough time to be a Devils fan, with the team falling apart in the mid-2010s after a sustained streak of excellence that lasted more than two decades and largely failing to get off the canvas since. Apparently, the Devils have been ready to break out of their doldrums on a few occasions, but they haven’t, frequently undermining the, frankly, fairly modest expectations placed on them over several different seasons.
You really don’t have to take my word for it, the results have spoken for themselves since the 2013 season. In that stretch, the Devils (among teams that have been around since) are 28 of 30 in wins and ranking points. The only franchises behind the Devils in those categories over the past 10 seasons are the arizona coyotes and the buffalo sabers. Certainly not the best company to keep. The Devils also rank 28th out of 30 in goals scored in that stretch (23 out of 30 in goals allowed), making their efforts not only pointless but also mind-numbingly boring.
Why bring all this up? Well, wallowing in the wreckage of Devils seasons has become part of the job here, but the larger point I want to address is how hard it has become to believe that This time it will be different when it comes to the New Jersey Devils. The Devils have had a perfectly good offseason to this point (assuming things don’t go terribly wrong with the Jesper Bratt situation). They took out some disappointing players, brought in some solid veteran help, beefed up their goalkeeping situation and hired what appear to be a couple of pretty solid assistant coaches. They’ve ticked a lot of the boxes for things they would theoretically need to do to be in a position to compete going into next season.
And yet…
We’ve all been here before. The Devils have been more ostentatious at times in the recent past, sure, but this is coming into another offseason where the Devils, after a poor season, have plugged the right holes and put themselves in a position for their young core take another. step and get the team back in the playoff conversation. Overall, Tom Fitzgerald and his staff have done a decent job on paper to improve the team. Fitz has missed some big goals, yes, but getting some big goals in the past hasn’t changed the team’s fortunes much either. Even my least favorite move, keeping Lindy Ruff, has been mitigated by hiring some assistants with strong recent track records.
So, granting the above that this has been a pretty decent offseason for the team to this point, why can’t I shake off the sense of creeping doom that pervades the Devils’ modern existence? Perhaps it’s because the closest the Devils have ever come to success on the ice was a single playoff appearance thanks to a dominant season from Taylor Hall, in which a superior Tampa team gave them the sweep of the old gentlemen, with the only win in that series going on to represent the franchise’s only playoff win since June 2012.
The general belief is that demons are close. Is it so just there. If they can get some goal, they will be much better.. If their young core continues to improve as it has in recent seasons, they will be dangerous.. Injections of veteran and even championship experience should help teach a young team how to win.. If the new assistants can fix the structural issues on defense and power play, they’ll be much better.. It’s always the “if” around here that everything hinges on.
The “ifs” quickly turned into “buts” last season when the Devils, hoping to be plucky upstarts in the East, finished 37 points out of last place in the playoffs. Did the Devils improve 37 points this offseason? Can any team realistically improve 37 points in an offseason? The assumption on which any hope of the Devils’ short-term success must be based is that they weren’t a truly talented 63-point team last season. You have to believe the Devils were an 80- or 85-point team that just had a bunch of bad chances. That the circumstances worsened and they moved away from them. They weren’t basement dwellers in the same way that, say, the Arizona Coyotes were, openly tanking. I think there is a compelling argument to be made on all fronts.
The thing is, most of the Devils’ plethora of bottom-of-the-barrel teams over the past decade have made a similar argument that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. But they have been bad, up to and including 2021-22, despite any of those arguments. The 2017-18 version of the team remains an atypical oasis in what is otherwise a largely free desert of hockey fun.
So, I find myself struggling with what to do with the next season. Hope is eternal in professional sports, of course, but the wells of optimism have been substantially depleted over the last decade of hockey in New Jersey. It is quite difficult not to get tired at some point. That doesn’t mean success is impossible. In a purely detached, analytical sense, there’s a lot to like about the Devils team heading into the season. Until we get through the entire season without the team going down the drain in January and playing the streak for the last 40 games, it will be hard to believe the team is actually real. Until they make someone regret betting against them, it seems like a lot of us will be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Although maybe this time it will be different.