To a man, the Devils not only will say but did say they were a better team than they showed in their five-game first-round defeat to the Flyers that ended with last night’s 3-0 Game 5 whimper of a loss on home ice, and to that I would respond, so were the 30th-overall Oilers.
There were no redeeming features to the once-great organization’s third consecutive opening round exit from the tournament the Devils owned not all that long ago. Except that it was a long time ago, before the lockout, in another arena, in another era.
It’s not necessarily that the Devils played with a lack of pride through this series, it’s that they played without a heightened sense of urgency in all but their 5-3 victory in Game 2. It’s that they played with a regular-season pulse when an accelerated heartbeat was demanded, as it is of all teams in the Stanley Cup playoffs. At one time it would not have been necessary to point this out to the Devils, for they would have scoffed at having to sit through an introductory lecture identifying postseason requirements.
But these last three editions wearing the logo are descendents of the three-time Cup winners by birth only. One thing becomes clearer and clearer every spring for this team that is 5-12 over the last three postseasons while failing to win even a single game when facing elimination, with all three of those situations occurring on home ice. When the Devils left The Exit of Champions, 16W, to make the move south, they left their passion and their pedigree behind somewhere on the Turnpike and not even Google has come up with a GPS system sophisticated enough to track them down.
Two years ago it was the Rangers in five in the Sean Avery Series and last year it was Carolina scoring twice in the final 80 seconds of Game 7. But this defeat is the worst, if measurements of failure are necessary or helpful.
This year, the Devils went down with a whimper, shut out over the final 107:36, unable to score an even-strength goal over the final three matches. It wasn’t the match-up, though the Devils beat the Flyers only twice (2-8-1) in 11 games. It was the Devils.
Martin Brodeur, outplayed by Brian Boucher both last night and over the series but hardly the goat, understood that.
“You want to say the Flyers were a bad match, you could say that about the Rangers two years ago and about Carolina last year because we lost to them before, but come on,” Brodeur said. “There’s a lot that goes into it, but it’s not acceptable with the talent and players we have to go home after five games.”
Ilya Kovalchuk, who led the team in scoring with six points (2-4), was unable to make his teammates better, but then, his teammates shouldn’t have expected help when they weren’t helping themselves.
Elias, once a great postseason offensive force, has scored two even-strength goals in his last 27playoff games. He did not score in this series.
Zach Parise, a postseason disappointment, scored once against Boucher, that a shorthanded goal in Game 2 when he was freed of Chris Pronger’s big-bodied shadow.
Travis Zajac was a blip on the radar. Jamie Langenbrunner was essentially invisible. Indeed, there is a sense that the captain’s late-season issues with head coach Jacques Lemaire were not only significant and not at all related to self-interest, but a symptom of something larger that infected the group.
There is something fundamentally wrong here. General manager Lou Lamoriello made the correct move in acquiring Kovalchuk — sorry, Zdeno Chara and Drew Doughty were not available — but it made no difference whatsoever.
The Devils are out. Their era of greatness officially has been put to bed. It was swell while it lasted.