The Devils never really reached their potential this past season, and I think it’s safe to say they never really reached their potential. However, there were stretches where they played fairly well, and other stretches where they were terrible.
When looking back on the regular season, there are not many stretches that were super memorable as being long, positive momentum shifters for the New Jersey Devils. It felt like they were playing from behind the entire season, trying to rise up the rankings into a playoff position and never quite being able to do so. However, there were times where they were playing better and winning more games than not, and if those times lasted over 82 games, they would’ve had a much better shot.
Instead of that, however, there were stretches where the team really fell apart and struggled mightily, and you could really consider these times as the stretches that doomed the 2023-24 Devils. We can take a look at the team’s expected goal differential throughout the season on a 10-game rolling average to really see when the team was doing well and it was expected they would score more goals than their opposition, and when the team was doing poorly and it was not expected that they would do so.
There is a great chart by MoneyPuck that showcases this information, you can check it out at the link here, or look at the picture below:
Now obviously, the team fell apart at the end of the season when they were eliminated, so those last few games when the chart just absolutely tanks down to season lows really isn’t the point to consider, at least not for this article’s purpose. We can talk about how the team gave up later, that could be worth a discussion, especially in regards to the coaching staff. But for now, we really want to look earlier than that, when they were still alive for playoff contention and should have been playing better, more competitive hockey.
Initially, after a couple of early rough games, the Devils mostly played well. The chart continually rises from October 20th, which was a 5-4 overtime win against the Isles in New York, through December 5th, a 6-5 win against Vancouver during the Western road trip. It was a time of progress as the team was figuring out its identity and continually improving as a team. They didn’t get off to a rocket-hot start, but they were getting better and becoming the team we thought they had the potential to become.
Then, things changed, and not for the better. From that game until December 23rd, the last game before the Christmas break, the team slumped in terms of expected goals. They actually performed decently enough on the ice in terms of wins and losses, but that slump is mainly shown in the 3-game losing streak at home between the 17th and the 21st, with losses to Anaheim, Philadelphia, and Edmonton. But again, with other wins sandwiching those losses, it wasn’t a killer stretch in terms of the standings, so they weathered the storm from December, which wasn’t murderous.
The next stretch that really started to doom the team, however, came not long after. The Devils came out of Christmas break playing well, and their xGoal differential jumped until January 5th. From then until February 6th, it was basically a complete disaster in terms of expected goals. And it coincided with what was a very poor month for their record. Starting with the January 6th game against Vancouver, the Devils went 3-6-1 the rest of the way through January. That really hurt them in the standings, and with the season over halfway over at that point, it left the team with not a ton of time to recover from that. And of course, they never did.
Initially, though, they tried and did improve somewhat. The stretch from February 10th through March 1st was quite good in terms of expected goal differential. If they maintained that throughout the remainder of the season, they would’ve been competitive for a playoff spot for sure, and might have gotten to the wild card, who knows. But instead, March became an abject disaster, with the differential falling consistently until they were officially eliminated when it then plummeted into the dirt.
So when you look back at the season, the two worst stretches were in January and March, times when they needed to be good to reach a wild card spot, but instead floundered and just fell instead. We remember the beginning of the season being tough, and wanting this team to start off red hot and play like they did the season prior, but in reality, things really did not start going off the rails until the calendar turned to 2024. February was a pretty good month overall, but January and March were arguably the two worst stretches of the season for the Devils, at a time when they needed to be playing their best hockey to reach a wild-card spot. Next season, let’s hope they can play their best hockey down the stretch, not their worst.