New Jersey Devils: Ben Lovejoy, Drew Stafford Head To IR

The New Jersey Devils see the train of injured players get longer after Ben Lovejoy and Drew Stafford ended up on IR Tuesday. It’s starting a terrifying trend for the team as they head into a tough matchup.

Another day, another two New Jersey Devils player heading to injured reserve. The team announced Tuesday that forward Drew Stafford and defenseman Ben Lovejoy would be on the shelf for the foreseeable future. This adds to Travis Zajac, Steve Santini, Jesper Bratt and Cory Schneider who are all working their way back from different injuries.

For a real quick aside, I should say that I am sorry. It seems like with one quick opinion, this may be all my fault.

Yeah, I said that. My bad. To be fair, this was when Will Butcher was possibly dealing with a major injury, so I was emotional when I heard he wasn’t missing any time. Either way, this may have jinxed us.

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Moving on, the Devils called up Eric Gryba and John Quenneville to replace their injured players. This is great news for Quenneville, who did not deserve to get demoted to Binghamton. He ended up only playing one game for the B-Devils before he was given another chance.

Hopefully, Hynes plays Quenneville over Kevin Rooney. Quenneville was much better in his time than Rooney was in his game.

Gryba could be used in Thursday’s game. It’s down to him or Yegor Yakovlev for the final spot in the lineup. There are serious ramifications if Yak plays, but head coach John Hynes has made the best decision for the team before, waivers be darned.

Going back to the players that were injured, it’s hard to tell what happened. We can’t really point out when Lovejoy got injured, and he was a surprise when he was held out on Saturday. The fact that he went on IR is seriously concerning. All we know now is that he’s out with a lower-body injury. Stafford, on the other hand, we didn’t even know he was hurt at all. This is a surprising turn of events that now he’s on the shelf with an upper-body injury.

The injury bug is officially taking space within the Devils locker room. These aren’t back-breaking injuries, and their replacements will be fine, but the injuries are starting to add up and really hurt this lineup overall.