Can the New Jersey Devils Score Goals for Cory Schneider?

It’s no secret that the New Jersey Devils have had trouble scoring goals these last few years.

Even the best of teams go through goal droughts, it’s just part of hockey. It usually isn’t something to be extremely alarmed by, except for when the lack of goals lasts for multiple seasons and the team begins to rely on their goalie to save them.

For the better part of the last two seasons, the Devils have depended primarily on goalie Cory Schneider to save them from getting out of tight spots, with little to no help. I mean, yes, it’s the goaltender’s job to be consistently dependable, which Cory is, but the goalie also needs some help from the boys up front.

Last season, Cory solely carried this team on his shoulders.
Sure, he had some scoring help from Cammalleri and Henrique,  but overall, Cory Schneider ran the show.

By the time that the season had ended, the Devils decided that they didn’t even want to hold their annual end-of-the-season awards for the players, because truth be told, they didn’t really deserve to be awarded. Cory would have won all of the awards. When press asked the players who they thought deserved to be the team’s MVP, they all unanimously decided that Schneider was the team’s MVP for the season.
That alone speaks wonders for the Devils.

This season, the boys started off on a hot streak. They were consistently scoring goals and winning games under their new coach and management. A fresh start had swept across the Devils, and it was a welcome change.
All members of the team had started to pull their own weight and weren’t relying on Cory to do everything for them and in turn, if they had slipped up or couldn’t get to the net fast enough, Schneider did his job and stopped most of the pucks that came his way.

Because of this newfound confidence, the New Jersey Devils have gone on this season to beat top-of-the-league teams such as the Chicago Blackhawks (the Devils ended up sweeping the defending Stanley Cup champs) and the Montreal Canadiens.

Watching the current Devils was like watching an entirely different team from last year, and it was refreshing for a while.

But now here we are, 14 weeks into the season and they’ve begun to give up losses that should have been easy wins.
The defense has begun to fail Schneider again and with the exception of Kyle Palmieri, none of the forwards have been consistently scoring goals.
They’ve got players like Adam Henrique, Lee Stempniak and Mike Cammalleri that regularly step up and take plenty of shots on goal. Then they have Travis Zajac, who’s a god in the faceoff circle.
In the back they have captain Andy Greene and his fellow defensemen, John Moore and Damon Severson, who regularly help out with the net-minding and do a pretty decent job helping Schneider out.

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Now on the opposite end of the spectrum, the Devils have defensemen like Eric Gelinas and Adam Larsson who both got raises over the offseason, and haven’t done much to prove that they deserved them.
Larsson has done a lot more than Gelinas, and he’s definitely improved from last season when he was benched constantly under the criticism of old coach, Pete Deboer, but Larsson has recently begun to get sloppy and has cost the Devils several goals already this season.

And Gelinas tends to go out onto the ice and act as though he doesn’t want to be there.
It almost seems to be that if he’s out on the ice, there’s either going to be a big goal against Schneider or Cory is going to have to make one heck of a save and that isn’t fair to Cory.

There are also guys like Jacob Josefson and Jordin Tootoo that mean well, but just don’t put up points. Instead, they rack up penalty minutes and send the Devils on unnecessary penalty kills.
The Devils PK units usually work pretty well, but it gets annoying seeing the same guys go to the box game after game, usually for the same dumb penalties.
And while their PK is good, it’s not perfect. Some of the worst goals of the season have come on the PK, and they could have been avoided altogether, if the players would be more careful with their play. Sometimes a penalty is necessary, that’s true. But other times, and in the case of the Devils, more often than not, the penalties are just careless and hinder the quality of the play.

When these players don’t step up and score goals, they rely heavily on the goalie to do all of the work. When they rely heavily on the goalie to do all of the work, he then proceeds to beat himself up if he lets in a goal that the team can’t recover. Nothing is more heartbreaking than having to listen to a goaltender blaming himself for a loss.
When the team can’t step up as a team and work together to score goals and win games, they let everyone down. They let themselves down, they let their fans down and most importantly, they let their goalie down and that’s not fair.

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The good news is that all hope is obviously not lost.

The current Devils roster has a pretty good idea of what they need to do to get back on track. They’ve been winning more games than they have in recent years, and more guys are stepping up and taking chances. They’re in a minor rut right now, but it’s not something that they can’t handle.

They’ve got a  long way to go, but keep in mind that we haven’t even reached the All-Star break yet.
The New Jersey Devils still have plenty of time to turn things around and go back to showing everybody who doubts them that they’re still in the race to become Cup contenders.