The Devils Opened Their Home To The Stanley Cup Champs And Promptly Sobered Them Right Up10/12/2018 First, some context. The Washington Capitals were on the ass end of a back-to-back. If you weren't aware of that when the game started then you should have easily been able to infer so by the end of it. That's not to take anything away from what a fast and unrelenting Devils' team was able to accomplish by running ragged a team that's given them absolute fits in recent years, but you typically don't skate laps around the reigning champions, who've been on an absolute heater to start the season, without some other factors working in your favor. Another one of those factors was the Devils having fresh legs on familiar ice, as it can't be discounted that they were chomping at the bit to return home after being out of the country for nearly two weeks. I don't really think doing so against a back-up goalie helped their cause, as Pheonix Copley made just as many saves that he shouldn't as he let in goals he shouldn't. However, for the sake of the cold shower I'm in desperate need of after watching the Devils play near perfect hockey against the best the league has to offer, I'll also include the fact that they were shooting on someone I've never of in the disclaimer. Anyway, that about concludes my list of reasons to keep it in your pants while immediately penciling the Devils into a playoff spot after watching them top off the whole 6-pack in sobering up the Stanley Cup Champs... The truth is, not even the most annoyingly delusional fan that thinks every player and/or prospect will play to their potential could have scripted such a stellar start to this season. Never mind the lopsided outcomes, because you can go up and down the entire roster, position by position, and the only concern you'd come up with is that not one of the offseason concerns has reared its ugly head as of yet. I'm generally a glass half full kind of guy, but the most worrisome thing about how great the team, as a whole, has looked is that water eventually finds its level. Until it does, however, it's important to drink in the overflowing optimism being spilled by a group that's performing like it wholeheartedly disagreed with the notion that they were in desperate need of reinforcements over the summer. Mirco Mueller appeared, well, unnoticeable, which is just the biggest compliment you can give to a defenseman that went from in and out of the lineup to first pairing responsibilities in a few short months. Damon Severson, as I live and breath, played positional defense with a marked physicality of which I have to assume is the result of either Alexander Ovechkin and Evgeni Kuznetsov threatening to tag team his mother...or his comfortability next to Andy Greene. After two games, that pairing has returned encouraging results that lead you to believe that neither was nearly as bad as the cards as they were dealt last season. I would have told you that Marcus Johansson and Pavel Zacha were playing off of each other in dominant fashion before the former embraced his inner Joe Sakic to cap off a perfectly set play, and - regardless of the latter's inability to do the same on multiple glorious occasions - I definitely would have given him a 5-star review before seeing this eye-popping statistic...
I suppose you can include Keith Kinkaid in with the pleasant surprises, as - other than some Cory Schneider-esque expeditions outside the crease - he's picked up right where he left off in backstopping the Devils down the stretch, though I don't think that he was anywhere near as much of a question mark as others. Regardless, just two games in, all those question marks have been responded to with exclamation points, and all the "givens" on the roster (the 1st line, the 3rd pairing, Travis Zajac, etc.) have lived up to that title and more. Add to that the powerplay seeming in sync and that the penalty kill being flawless against a unit that doesn't need a full tank of gas to make you look stupid, and there's almost too much positive not to be paranoid. After all, these things can, and will, surely change as the season wears on. Still, if only until Sunday, there's just not even one single solitary reason to believe that the Devils are going to fall victim to the funk that has haunted young, first time playoff teams before them. This team looks just as energetic and even more attentive to detail than they were to start last season. The type of focus they displayed in doing so is just as encouraging, and even more important to sustained success, than the one-off emasculation of a tired team that got their reality fully checked, fore and back.
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