New Jersey Devils Need To Avoid A Bad November
By Nick Villano
The New Jersey Devils have been the surprise of the Eastern Conference. At 8-2-0, they sit at the top of the Metropolitan Division with games at hand. A similar hot start was extinguished by a bad November last season.
After a weekend that ended with four points in two games, the New Jersey Devils have changed their expectations. The team is sitting at the top of the Metropolitan Division with the first month about to come to a close. We’ve seen this team stay in it for a while before, but take a bad month to crush fans hopes.
Last year, the Devils started off November wonderfully. Winning five of the first seven games, it looked like the Taylor Hall trade made the Devils a legitimate threat. Then, it all fell apart.
The Devils lost six of the team’s final seven games of the month. That bad momentum turned into a certified collapse in December, where they won just four games in the month.
The team went from a legit contender to a trade deadline seller before the New Year.
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Looking at the schedule, this Devils team better be a different team if it’s going to avoid that. The Devils start the month with the dreaded Western Canada road trip. They take on Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary in a five day span. After that, they come home to play the red-hot St. Louis Blues and Connor McDavid and the Oilers. There’s also an eight day road trip that takes them to Chicago, Winnipeg, Toronto and Minnesota. That’s a rough trip for players not used to that kind of travel.
This has been a great start to the season, and I hate playing killjoy (almost as much as I hate when the Devils play Lovejoy), but this next stretch tells us the true colors of the New Jersey Devils. If the team can come out of November still in a playoff spot, this is a legit contender. This stretch is hard for the best of teams. If the Devils are one of those teams, they need to win more than they lose this month.