New Jersey Devils Entertainment Value Was Pretty Low, Even When They Were Playing
You might have noticed that the world isn’t so great right now. These last few days and weeks have been pretty miserable, especially for our younger readers. This is not the venue to go into depth on that, but it is the venue to pontificate a bit on the nature of sports.
Sports, at their base level, are a form of entertainment. Every now and then you’ll hear people say that sports “teach them balance in life” like shooting a puck or throwing a ball have any zen value. It’s nonsense, and it’s a lie we tell ourselves to feel better about watching strangers play games. Sports are chaos, and we consume them for entertainment. There’s no shame in that. Humans have been doing it for centuries for a reason.
This is all a long way of saying that we watch the Devils to be entertained, and we have not been entertained this season. When your entertainment isn’t entertaining, it’s hard to justify investing time or money into it. This is going to sound weird coming a person writing about the team, but consider this my thesis: being bored with the product and looking for entertainment elsewhere is not a sin. It doesn’t mean you don’t support the team. It means the team gives you no reason to watch them.
On ice, the team is a mess. The defensive depth is nonexistent, and the star defenseman – P.K. Subban – is having the worst year of his career. The forwards passing tape-to-tape is a rarity, and the lack of results speak for themselves. It wasn’t until I happened to be in Florida in January and went to see the Panthers play the Leafs that I realized how bad things were in New Jersey – the Panthers seemingly never missed a pass, and every line had at least some degree of chemistry.
Not every team gets a coach as good as Joel Quennville, of course, but one should hope that the team they choose to root for and write about can complete a pass. Interim head coach Alain Nasreddine is running the same systems now-fired-before-Nashville-hired-him head coach John Hynes was. They are winning more under Nas, but that’s because he is getting bailed out by goaltending.
The front office is also a mess, and arguably a worse one. Trading away expiring contracts made sense – the team was lacking for… let’s call it “star power” for now… but it was time for the rebuild. How does the team ride out the season with its newly acquired young assets? By constantly calling up and sending down prospects with no rhyme or reason, and then making them watch from the press box. When they do play, they’re shoved on the fourth line alongside John Hayden and some other warm body. Meanwhile Miles Wood, captain of the dump-and-chase brigade, gets first line minutes.
Even off ice, there’s not a lot interesting happening. Once the Taylor Hall intrigue ended, there were no storylines outside of Ray Shero’s embarrassing firing. Since then? Crickets. We’re getting served a boring team playing boring games in a boring style.
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There’s so much good entertainment out there right now that it’s hard to justify carving out three hours a few times a week to watch this. Why would I want to watch the team’s future flail away on the fourth line when I can just watch Better Call Saul live? Loving a team and wanting it to succeed shouldn’t mean that we’re obligated to watch a boring product.
At least Detroit has a plan in place. At least Ottawa’s a train wreck. At least the Sabres have the infamous Duane from Buffalo call. Our fanbase is so defeated, we can’t even muster up that energy.
The Devils aren’t even a train wreck – they’re just a car dead by the side of the road. There’s no entertainment for passersby, and for the moment no way forward for the person in the car. Worst of all, there’s no direction. Part of that is coming into the season with high expectations, sure, but after the first few months we’d at least like a roadmap.
The season is on pause for reasons of public health. The reasons are legitimate and if we’re smart and lucky about it, we’ll flatten the curve and all of this preparation will have been for something. But this pause has also been a mercy on Devils fans, whether we want to admit it or not. There’s better forms of entertainment out there than this.