The New Jersey Devils were the best team in the National Hockey League on Sunday. As of Friday morning, they stink. If you ask some fans, they expect a .500 record by the end of November. They think the hot start was fugazi, even if it was against a bunch of really good opponents.
They think what we saw on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, when the Devils went on the road and were dominated by the Colorado Avalanche and San Jose Sharks, as the real Jersey’s Team.
Let’s calm down New Jersey Devils fans.
No team is going to win 90 percent of their games. That obviously wasn’t sustainable. Do the good teams who lose need to look this bad in doing so? No, but these types of games happen to every team. Remember when the Devils took out the Florida Panthers in back-to-back games last season? That didn’t seem to have long-term effects now did it.
We could jump into the numbers that say the defense isn’t as bad as it looked, and it was just an off night from the two veteran goaltenders. We could point out the offense that still had positives, including two goals from Dawson Mercer on Thursday night and scoring four goals in four minutes against one of the best teams in the league on Tuesday, but again, these are small narratives.
This is a long season. We’re 11 games into an 82-game season. We don’t want to get too high or too low. There’s plenty of time to figure out what’s happening right now.
This is still a team with Jack Hughes and Nico Hischier healthy. The team is really missing Cody Glass and Brett Pesce, but they both should be back sometime in November. It’s one month of survival without them, and the Devils will start to get more and more reinforcements.
Sheldon Keefe is a quality coach who is going to turn this around. Honestly, it doesn’t even need “turning around.” The Devils have 16 points in 11 games. Everyone would have signed up for that record coming out of October.
Only the Pittsburgh Penguins are ahead of the Devils, and if New Jersey wins their next game against the Los Angeles Kings, they will be tied. The Metropolitan Division is looking really good right now, so losses against the Sharks can’t happen moving forward, but we can look at this loss as one bad night and move on. There’s nothing to worry about right now.