Life is about setting goals, and then putting in the requisite work in order to achieve said goals.
It’s something that all of us do in everyday life. Maybe our goal is to get an “A” on an exam in school, or save enough money for a down payment on a house, or to lose 20 pounds in time for a friend’s wedding. Whatever the goal is, you have that benchmark to work towards. And sometimes, those big goals are only doable once you succeed with a bunch of smaller goals in the process. Getting “A’s” on exams
in a bunch of different classes is how one would make honor roll or a principal’s list. Earning a promotion at work helps a person make more money to afford that down payment. Cutting out sweets and going for a jog helps one lose the weight they’re looking to lose.
In the NHL, every team’s ultimate goal is to win the Stanley Cup. Obviously, that goal is more attainable for a specific handful of teams this year (Florida, Edmonton, Vegas, etc) than the worst teams in the league (San Jose, Chicago, etc), but the long-term goal for every team is (or should be) to win a Stanley Cup.
Winning the Stanley Cup is a fairly significant goal and its not something every team can do. Only one of the 32 teams in the NHL is going to achieve that in any given year, while the other 31 franchises come up empty-handed. For a Devils team that has made the playoffs twice in the last three years and has only gotten past the first round once, there’s still a lot of work to be done to get to that point, assuming this iteration of the Devils ever gets there.
Rather than point out the one big goal that the Devils are obviously working towards, I thought this week that it was worth discussing a bunch of smaller goals the Devils can and should work towards to ultimately get to where they want to go.
Be A 100+ Point Team
The Devils made the playoffs with 91 points last season, and they were probably fortunate to do so.
Of course, you know the story of the 2024-25 Devils by now, so there’s little need to rehash it other than to say a team that was cruising to a playoff berth over the first half of the season struggled enough over the second half of the season to where things got a little too close for comfort. And while the Devils ultimately took care of their own business late in the season with wins over Columbus to keep them at an arm’s length distance for the third playoff spot in the Metropolitan Division, things could have gone very differently had those specific games gone the other way.
Being a 100+ point team is basically my way of saying leave no doubt this season that you are indeed a playoff team. Teams that get to that milestone make the playoffs by a comfortable margin. More importantly, it’s important for the Devils to not have their performance as a team fluctuate as wildly as it has the past few seasons where shoddy defense and goaltending has sunk seasons.
If the Devils want to be taken seriously as a contender much like teams like Vegas, Colorado, and Tampa are, the next step for them is for the regular season to more or less be a formality. I’m not necessarily saying they should coast or go on auto-pilot, but the ebbs and flows of the 82 game regular season should more or less be a formality and at the end of the day, the Devils have their 104 points or so and are comfortably in the playoffs. Whether or not they even make the playoffs should no longer be a question or up for debate.
This goal should be attainable, but it’s not a certainty. Interestingly enough, Draftkings has the Devils regular season over/under at 99.5 points, which is the same as Toronto. Only Dallas, Carolina, Tampa Bay, Vegas, Colorado, Edmonton, and Florida have higher totals.
Win The Metropolitan Division
This sort of goes hand in hand with my last point, but winning the Metropolitan Division would be a nice change of pace for a variety of reasons. The Devils haven’t won the Metropolitan Division since it received that silly name prior to the 2013-14 season and they haven’t won their division, regardless of alignment, since 2009-10.
Why does winning the division matter? Well, I’m not naive enough to just assume that any playoff matchup is a gimme, but with the NHL insisting on their bad divisional playoff format, division winners get one of the wild card teams in their first round matchup.
Yes, there will be years where your ‘reward’ for winning the division is a Florida team on cruise control and content to just make the tournament before they do what they do. But most years, you’re looking at flawed teams in those wild card spots. You’re looking at teams like Montreal and Ottawa, or maybe another surprising upstart like Buffalo or Detroit if they ever get there, or perhaps an Isles or Columbus team that sneaks in because nobody else is good enough to take that spot. I’ll take my chances in that scenario.
Find a Way To Keep Your Best Players Healthy Later In The Season
I alluded to this a few weeks ago when I talked about how the Devils were due for better injury luck, but it bears repeating. This iteration of the Devils has no chance of winning in the playoffs if they can’t find a way to get there with their best players staying healthy and being available to play.
Of course, how does one get there with the randomness and dumb luck involved with injuries? I don’t know that the answer is necessarily as simple as “get bigger and stronger”. Not when players of all shapes and sizes, from the Hughes brothers to Jacob Markstrom, Timo Meier, Jonas Siegenthaler, Dougie Hamilton, and Johnathan Kovacevic have spent time out due to injuries the last few years. All the training in the world isn’t going to matter if one takes the wrong step and tears up ligaments in their knee, or if the Jacob Troubas of the world connect with a flying elbow and now all of a sudden someone is out with a concussion. This is a contact sport, after all.
I can at least appreciate the Devils trying to be proactive in this regard, hence their hiring of Greg Ackerman this offseason. But hiring all the data scientists in the world isn’t going to do anything if one suffers a fractured jaw due to taking a puck to the face.
Beat The Carolina Hurricanes
I say this as a lifelong Devils fan. I am sick and tired of losing to the Carolina Hurricanes in the playoffs.
I still haven’t gotten over losing to Carolina in 2006 and 2009, and I’m not happy about the Devils season ending in Raleigh in two of the past three seasons either. As much as I begrudingly respect that organization, I’ve seen and heard enough from Rod Brind’Amour, the Staal brothers, their “storm surge”, their “siren sounders”, Sebastian Aho, Jordan Martinook, Jaccob Slavin, and Freddy Andersen for a lifetime.
I’m not going to go as far as to suggest that the Hurricanes have been to the Devils what the Yankees were to the Red Sox for so many years before they broke their curse. Or what the Pistons were to the Bulls in the late 80s. Or what the Chiefs have been to the Bills the last few years in the AFC. As I mentioned before, the divisional playoff format stinks. As long as Gary Bettman insists on having a bracket challenge that nobody cares about because this isn’t college basketball, there’s a decent chance the Devils will run into the Hurricanes at some point early in the tournament.
I don’t know that Carolina is living “rent free” in the Devils heads, but I do know that if I were Tom Fitzgerald, one of my top goals would be to build a roster that can beat them in a seven-game series. One might counter that argument by saying the goal should be to build a roster that can win a championship, and they’re not wrong to think that, but when the same team continues to be the roadblock you can’t get past, its something that needs to be looked at from an organizational standpoint. It’s part of the reason why I was so frustrated with the approach at the trade deadline last year when it was apparent for months that the Devils and Hurricanes were going to meet in the first round, and I don’t think anyone was necessarily surprised with the result once the games were played.
I don’t think the Devils are necessarily that far off from slaying the dragon that is Carolina, but at some point, you have to do it.
