Life After Brodeur: A New Devils Era

Life After Brodeur: A New Devils Era

Life after Brodeur: The Devils’ modern identity

A Legacy Built on Defense

The New Jersey Devils have traditionally been known for their defensive strength. For the 20 years between 1992 and 2012, the Devils allowed the fewest average goals per game in the league at just 2.44—and that makes sense, because they also allowed the fewest shots per game, an impressively low 26.3. As a result, only the Detroit Red Wings won more games over that 20-year span, despite New Jersey’s arguably average scoring numbers. Their unparalleled commitment to defense was made possible by the presence of Martin Brodeur in net, who won the Vezina Trophy four times during his career with the Devils and backstopped them through three Stanley Cup wins. Coming into the 2014-15 season, their first taste of life after Brodeur in over two decades, many wondered whether the Devils could maintain this high defensive level.

Cory Schneider Takes the Net

The Devils made a smart move in June 2013, anticipating Brodeur’s imminent retirement and bringing Cory Schneider onboard from the Vancouver Canucks. Ostensibly brought on as Brodeur’s backup, Schneider ended up playing more games than Brodeur in the 2013-14 season and arguably played better than the veteran throughout the year, finishing with a 1.97 GAA and a .921 save percentage. Though his performance in the 2014-15 season wasn’t as strong, the problems behind those weaker numbers had started taking shape well before Schneider ever joined the team.

A Team in Transition

Defensive Slippage in 2014-15

The first half of the 2010s were not New Jersey’s best era. Though they reached the 2012 Stanley Cup Final, that was their only postseason appearance between 2010-11 and 2014-15. Their goal production was low, as expected of a franchise built on suppressing offense. Devils teams of the 1990s and early 2000s had overcome low scoring through their expert use of the neutral zone trap, forcing opponents into turnovers and limiting their offensive-zone opportunities. Through the 2013-14 season, the Devils still allowed the fewest shots per game on average in the league, even during this slump-filled early stretch of the decade. In 2014-15, however, the Devils allowed opponents an average of 30.7 shots per game, an increase of 5.2 over the previous season’s average of 25.5. They also slipped shorthanded, dropping from a league-leading penalty-kill percentage of 86.4 in 2013-14 to 80.6 in 2014-15, good for just 21st in the league that season. These numbers are arguably more to blame for Schneider’s less impressive 2014-15 statistics than any decline in his own game; the team in front of him was simply asking a lot more of him than it ever asked of Martin Brodeur.

New Leadership, New Faces

“Rebuilding years” is not a phrase New Jersey Devils fans were used to hearing, but the team was showing every sign of a regime change in the early 2010s. This early stretch of life after Brodeur exposed just how much the franchise had leaned on its goaltending and its system, and while the change in net was the most visible shift, moves elsewhere on the roster may have had an even bigger impact on the team’s diminished defense. Ray Shero took over for longtime executive Lou Lamoriello as general manager, and the Devils brought in a new head coach in John Hynes. Though the club kept the top defensive pairing of Andy Greene and Adam Larsson intact from 2014-15, much of the rest of the roster turned over, with moves aimed largely at adding scoring punch to the top two lines. Center Patrik Elias had long been a fixture in New Jersey, but his best years were arguably behind him; he managed just 13 goals and 34 points in 2014-15, and his last 30-plus-goal season had come back in 2008-09. The addition of veteran winger Mike Cammalleri, who scored 27 goals in 2014-15, helped the offense, but it wasn’t enough to put the Devils back into postseason contention. This infusion of new blood into an aging roster was necessary, certainly, but the unfamiliarity with the club’s old systems—from the front office down—kept the Devils from being the impenetrable wall they had seemed to be in the golden years of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Hope on the Blue Line

Though the top pairing of Greene and Larsson looked strong in 2014-15, the team’s defensive depth behind them was clearly lacking. Luckily for the Devils, their blue line had the opposite problem from their forward group. Where the forwards were aging veterans who could no longer quite keep up, the defensemen were predominantly young players who had yet to reach their primes. The promise shown by young defensemen like Jon Merrill and Eric Gelinas during the 2014-15 season offered a glimmer of hope in an otherwise disappointing year. If nothing else, Devils fans can look back at 2014-15 as the season that revealed what life after Brodeur would really look like: the year Cory Schneider proved he could stand tall as the starting netminder, even when the team in front of him wasn’t making his job easy.