New Jersey Devils: 5 Ways To Salvage This Season
The New Jersey Devils season went literally about as bad as it possibly could. However, there are ways that the team could take this bad taste out of our mouths.
You know the story. We’ve told it about a hundred times already since October. The New Jersey Devils went into this season with more hype than we’ve seen in years. Nikita Gusev was the final piece to what looked like a perfect offseason puzzle. Then, it was like someone was writing a hockey horror story. In game one, they went from dominating to losing their starting goalie to giving up a lead not seen blown in years.
Since then, the Devils have been one of the worst hockey teams in the league. Only the Detroit Red Wings have fewer points in the standings. There was a chance the Devils season might not live up to expectations, but this is ridiculous. Cory Schneider is back on the scrap heap for the second time in one season. The head coach is gone. The GM is gone. Taylor Hall is gone. Sami Vatanen, Kyle Palmieri, Blake Coleman, Wayne Simmonds and Travis Zajac have all been mentioned in trade rumors, and who knows they can all be gone soon.
We need a pick me up. This season cannot continue to be as bad as it was to start. It’s literally impossible.
So, what could happen this season that would change the way we look at this season? It’s already one of the worst, if not the worst in Devils history. Only way to go is up, right? There are some things that could lessen the blow that is the rest of this useless season. We have to face facts, there’s no way the Devils are going to make the playoffs. If they won every single game for the rest of the season, they’d have 109 points. Basically, they can sweep 34 games in a row, and they might not win the President’s Trophy.
There are things we could see this season that would change our perspective, even if it doesn’t eliminate what happened to start the year.
Crush The Trade Deadline
First and foremost, the New Jersey Devils have to win the trade deadline. Like we said earlier, the Devils have seen some of their mainstays, and some of their unrestricted free agents tied to other teams. We don’t blame the reporters for those other teams. When a team is at the bottom of the standings, the contenders will come to them like vultures.
However, a good general manager can use those vultures to his or her advantage. There are going to be teams that low ball you with offers, but if the team makes it clear from the get go that the conversations will end right there, then you eventually stop wasting time with teams that are never going to hit your price.
Also, the Devils don’t want to waste assets. Blake Coleman was drafted with a 3rd-round pick back in the 2011 NHL Draft. He’s on an insanely affordable contract, and the Devils spent six years waiting for him to develop before he became a full-time NHLer. If after all that, they get a 2nd-round pick for him, then this is a failure of epic proportions.
However, if the Devils are instead able to trade Kevin Rooney for a 5th-round pick, Sami Vatanen for a 1st-round pick and a prospect, then Andy Greene for a similar deal that the Devils got for Ben Lovejoy last year, then we all leave happy.
The Devils have to figure out who they are going to re-sign, and that includes the players with term. If Kyle Palmieri is not someone you are giving a contract to this offseason, it might be worth it to trade him when his value is high now. Either way, the Devils have some really hard decisions, but they need to win these trades after the Taylor Hall deal came with mixed results at best.
Jack Hughes Develops Into A Scorer
One of the bigger disappointments of this season is Jack Hughes. Not in the fact that we’re worried about his future, more in the fact that it seems like the Devils were never able to find the right fit for him. A lot of it has to do with the Devils coaching staff being distracted by a team with no chemistry. That’s how Hughes ends up with Miles Wood and Wayne Simmonds on his wing most nights.
Now, we need to see what Hughes can do in the NHL. He’s smaller, so he’s been manhandled more often than we like to see. It’s mostly because he’s trying to do too much in the offensive zone. When Wood and Simmonds are you’re linemates, there is pressure to make the perfect play. 18 year olds don’t make perfect plays.
What we need to see from Hughes is exactly what he can do right now. He can make people miss, he can take a wicked shot and he can use his speed to make plays. He’s not in the place where he can make the players on his line better. Hughes needs to focus on himself.
Right now, Hughes has 17 points on the season. He’s missed some time, and he only has two goals since November 17th. The drought is annoying, but we aren’t worried about what this means. However, he can prove a lot by bouncing back. If he shows that he is working when it’s not sunshine and fairytales, then we have a lot of hope for the future.
Mackenzie Blackwood Gets His Save Percentage To .920
Goaltending is and will forever be the question mark over this franchise, that is until it’s fixed. Mackenzie Blackwood has had stretches where he was dominant in net. He was absolutely lights out night in and night out from December 7th to January 2nd. Outside of those dates, things were a little hairy. That’s why, above all else, we must see consistency from Blackwood.
Right now, Mackenzie Blackwood has a .905 save percentage, which puts him at 34th in the NHL. That’s rough. However, if he’s able to get his save percentage to a little over .920, then he’s going to be at or at least right near the top ten.
To get there will be no easy task. Blackwood has faced 1,011 shots so far this year, so based on our calculations, we expect him to fact another 716 (it’s a loose math equation, but it’s how we’re coming to this conclusion).
To get his save percentage to over .920, he needs to make at least 1,589 saves, meaning he would allow 138 goals total this season. He’s already allowed 98 goals this season. Let’s say he takes 6-10 of the final 34 games off. That means he can only allow 40 goals in, say, 24 games. That’s allowing less than two goals per game. That seems near impossible, but if he puts together a stretch of a month where he is dominant again, this is what we need to be happy with our goalie of the future.
Let’s say we can accept a .915 save percentage. Then he needs to make 1581 saves on 1727 shots. That still only gives him 48 goals allowed. If he has another stinker where he allows five goals, it makes it near impossible to get this done. He needs to be near perfect, but if he is it sure would help how we feel.
At Least Two AHLers Show NHL Chops
Three years ago, the New Jersey Devils were in a somewhat similar position. They were sellers at the trade deadline, and there wasn’t much to play for down the stretch. Since there was nothing to lose, the Devils gave extended looks to a few players. Two of those players were Blake Coleman and Miles Wood. Wood especially felt out of nowhere. He was a player we didn’t expect to see make it out of his draft. In fact, we liked Myles Bell who the Devils took in the 6th round of that same draft.
The Devils need another year where they find two to three new players that are going to stick around for a while. Last year, the Devils didn’t add anyone, so we thought they were going to give a lot of these players like Joey Anderson and Brett Seney a tryout, but because of injuries or other issues, they only played limited roles. Then, the Devils made a bunch of moves that left them in Binghamton anyway.
Honestly, the only AHL player that proved himself to be an NHL player was Mackenzie Blackwood. Obviously, that was a huge development last season, but getting a forward in on it would have been nice.
This season, we need to see NHL chops from two of Anderson, Seney, Mike McLeod, Nathan Bastian, Mikhail Maltsev, Josh Jacobs, Nick Merkley, or Fabian Zetterlund. Two players need to show they are making the team next season. Whether it’s a scoring streak, or just nice solid play, we need more than what we’ve seen so far.
Hire An Awesome Coach
If the New Jersey Devils hire a coach that is going to send them in the right direction, this season will eventually be known as the season we finally found the right coach. Who knows who that might be. It could be Gerard Gallant (yes, please) or Peter Laviolette (less enthused) or Mike Babcock (completely unenthused). No matter what, the Devils need to find the right coach for this crew.
All season long, we’ve talked about the possibility of Jon Cooper joining the Devils. Obviously, it looked a lot more possible before he took his team on an insane run back to a playoff spot. However, if the Tampa Bay Lightning get the Boston Bruins or Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round, we could see them getting knocked out again and Cooper losing his job.
It doesn’t have to be Cooper. It has to be somebody that’s going to take this Devils team into the right direction. Rikard Grönborg is a name we’ve been seeing more often, and could be really good. We will go into him more in a future article.
The Devils need to get their coach. John Hynes was not the right fit, and it looks like the coaches that are available compared to who might be a good fit, or who might want to come to New Jersey, and it’s all not seeming to fit right now. They need to find a coach. There are only going to be 32 of these jobs. Someone is going to swoop in and take a different coach (although the only other coaches hired are Devils retreads).
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If the Devils hire an awesome coach, we’ll feel a lot better about the future.