The offseason can breed a lot of critical examination and borderline negativity for NHL teams, especially when expectations are not met. I’m not saying the expectation was for the New Jersey Devils to hoist the Stanley Cup last season, but I think a greater majority of fans and pundits saw them going beyond the first round of the playoffs. Chalk it up to injuries, to disappointing individual seasons, to a team adjusting to a new system and coach, or even a combination of those factors, the fact of the matter is the Devils underachieved last season. As such, a lot of what the team did has been placed under a microscope this summer, and those examinations typically have a negative tone accompanying them. Yet, the hope is always that the analysis is wrong; that the players who underachieved had an anomaly of a season and they will bounce back. That the injured players will come back healthy and go for a full (or almost full – humans do get sick after all) season. Maybe hoping it all goes right is unrealistic.
But what if that just so happened to be the case for the Devils this season?
Oh sure, it’s easier said than done; we all watch the games every season, be it just Devils games or more hockey games depending upon our level of interest. Guys always get hurt; scorers slump at the worst time; goalies forget how to stop a beach ball from going behind them, let alone a puck. Yet for some teams (at least one) every year, enough goes right, if not everything, to get them to where they want to be.
So why can’t it be our Devils this season?
As I said earlier, critical analysis is part of hockey and hockey writing. But let’s take one day to forget about all of that. Trust me, I’m sure there will be plenty of chatter about it once something goes awry from expectations. Let’s just take one moment to subvert all of the narratives of the summer. No one will be injured in a way that causes them to miss substantial time. Dougie Hamilton is going to go back to being the Dougie of 2022-23. Ondrej Palat is going to turn back the clock if just merely for one season to be a contributor and solid vet presence. Timo Meier is going to revert to a 70 point scoring wrecking ball. Simon Nemec is going to break out and become an integral cog in the Devils machine. Dawson Mercer is going to remember that he’s allowed to score more than 40 points over the course of the season!
Is all of this happening likely? Again, no, but unlikely happens all the time in the NHL. In a summer where news has dried up at this point, and we’ve examined aspects of this team to death, we shouldn’t forget there’s a lot of positives on this team as well. And some of the aforementioned list is bound to go right this season; there could be other things not mentioned here that are good surprises this season as well. While next week I will probably be back to analyzing a perceived weakness of the Devils (maybe finally getting around to looking at the team’s drafting and development) once in a while it’s also healthy to acknowledge what is going well and to take an optimistic stance on where individuals and the team as a whole could go. The Devils are still a team on the rise, and maybe, just maybe, this is the season where everything goes right and New Jersey comes close (or maybe even gets) to lifting the Stanley Cup for a fourth time.
Leave any and all comments down below and thanks as always for reading!