Sorts of Sports

A Disaster in New Jersey

This is not what owner Jeff VanderBeek had in mind.  This is not what Lou Lamoriello had in mind.  This is not what Ilya Kovalchuk had in mind.

Through a third of the season the New Jersey Devils are 8-19-2 with 18 points (out of a possible 56).  They sit 14^th out of 15 teams in the Eastern Conference, with only the AHL Islanders behind them.  They’re currently 18 points behind the Tampa Bay Lightning and Boston Bruins, who currently hold the last playoff spot.

The offseason was promising.  They added John MacLean has their new head coach.  The players’ respected him from the start and said all the right things.  They acquired Jason Arnott, who was a part of their 2000 Stanley Cup winning team, and is coming off 30 goal seasons with the Nashville Predators.  They also added two highly regarded defenseman in Henrik Tallinder and Anton Volchenkov.

Of course, they also signed Ilya Kovalchuk, who had spent the last quarter of the 2009 season in Jersey.  He put up 27 points in 27 games and seemed to fit in nicely.  He played both sides of the ice and was the attacking forward the Devils desperately needed.  He then signed the much discussed 15-year, $100 million deal.

Fast forward to this season, the King of Newark through 29 games has only scored 5 times, to go with 9 assists.  That’s on pace for 41 points over the full season.  He has a horrible -18 to his record, and even has a healthy scratch for being late to too many meetings.  His play on the ice at times has looked lackadaisical, but overall he has skated hard, back checked and tried to do everything that was expected.  He says all the right things, but clearly he is thinking too hard.  The things I loved seeing from him last year are not taking place this year.

You don’t see him taking the puck from end to end trying to create on his own.  He doesn’t shoot from anywhere and everywhere and he just looks like this is all eating at him every day. Have the Devils “system” taken a guy who could score 40 goals with his arms tied behind his back and turned him into another product of a defensive minded system that held up great offensive talents?  Plenty of big seasons have come through New Jersey in the past few seasons, so what is holding Ilya Kovalchuk back.

The preseason had hope, Ilya Kovalchuk, Zach Parise, and Travis Zajac dominated as a line together, however after a few games the line struggled to score goals as did the entire team.  They were giving up over 3 goals a game too.  MacLean tried different combinations but nothing was working.  To this point, nothing has worked, and it seems that MacLean has run out of ideas.  The team is going to get Parise and Salvador back then General Manager Lou Lamoriello will have the struggle of making the decision on who needs to go.

There are definitely arguments to be made about Lamoriello’s poor cap management, and definitely MacLean’s inexperience at this level, but the fault lies within the players.  Along with Kovalchuk and Zajac, the entire team has underperformed, to be nice.  Captain Jamie Langenbrunner, who had 55 assists last season, has eight so far this year.  David Clarkson coming off a nice pay raise and a new contract this off season has four goals and seven points, and Brian Rolston, who signed that 4 year, $20 million deal, is in year number three and has two goals in 15 games.

Clearly some changes have to be made.  Trying to be optimistic, I hope when Parise comes back in February the Devils can make a run back to respectability, but by then they probably will be 30 points out of a playoff spot, so mov

Moves have to start now, to save the season that had so much hope at the start of it.

The hope for change began today as the Devils waived Brian Rolston.  Now there is a high chance, Rolston will stay with the club, but in the early season of giving, a team will take Rolston most likely on re-entry waivers at half the price.  Lamoriello wanted a little cap relief, since he doesn’t believe a team up against the cap should be performing as bad as the Devils have been.  Hopefully, a few more moves will open up some more cap room, because Lou has a lot to do.

First, he needs to get a more mobile defense, mainly a big puck moving defenseman.  Tomas Kaberle in Toronto comes to mind, but his cap hit of $4.5 million might be too much.  The second move is to get Ilya Kovalchuk a center to play with that can open up the ice and allow Kovalchuk to begin to play like the player that got him his enormous contract. The core of the Devils have been together too long and major moves are needed, however it is clear that Lamoriello believes in this team, but the light at the end of the tunnel, is Lou hates losing and the belief in these 20 players could quickly come to an end.  Considering how bad the Devils have been this season, and how much the league laughed at them during the off season, you would have to hope that the belief in his team is running thin.