The New Jersey Devils are not truly the team that has been steamrolling through games since the Olympic break, nor are they the awful team they were for the majority of the 2025-26 season. The painful reality is that they are still stuck somewhere in between.
On Saturday night, the Devils had an opportunity to make a serious statement and put the NHL on notice, but the problem was that they were playing the Carolina Hurricanes, the best team in the Eastern Conference.
Had they won, the Devils would have been on a three-game win streak and winners of six of their last seven. Instead, they failed the test they always fail... you know, the Hurricanes one.
It isn't a big deal, of course, to lose a game in late March already well out of playoff contention, but a win would have shown that the Devils had truly turned over a new leaf. Things actually started off well, with Timo Meier giving the Devils a 1-0 lead heading into the first intermission, but it was all downhill from there.
So, heading into the last two games of March, the Devils still have work to do. We all already knew that there was work to do to smooth the edges, but that is a new personnel problem as much as it is a core player problem.
Overall, though, the Devils' body of work for the last four weeks has been impressive. They have a lot to build on, and they need to continue winning more games than they lose heading into next season to maintain some semblance of confidence and momentum.
The good news is that Meier, Nico Hischier, Jesper Bratt, and Jack Hughes are all mostly humming again--Hughes especially--and the team has won the majority of its last handful of games in spite of average or bad goaltending. For what it's worth, Evgenii Dadonov finally scored a point (a goal!), too.