New Jersey Devils fans should stop caring about the win-loss record this season

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By CJ Turtoro (@CJTDevil)

Every time I tweet something good about the New Jersey Devils this year, I get responses like ‘but, they’re 28th in the league!’ or ‘they haven’t won a playoff series in a decade’; whatever version of the sentiment ‘we’re still not winning’, the flavor of the day happens to be. For a fanbase that’s had to deal with ineptitude for a pretty long time, that’s an understandable frustration. But here’s the thing … that’s dumb.

According to Hockeyviz, this team’s playoff chances first dipped below 1% over two months ago. Racking up dubs is important for one thing and one thing only: putting yourself in the best playoff spot possible.

If the Devils are out of the playoffs then the wins are not particularly important on their own. They are only important in terms of what they say about the team’s future performance.

For instance, you might say “But CJ, we want the team to be playing well so that we have momentum going into next year!” To which I’d say absolutely – but if you want to determine if the team is playing well, why are you looking at their win totals as the primary metric?

In a classic bit of hockey writing from the very early (pre-xG, pre-WAR, pre-RAPM) days of analytics, Alan Ryder opined on what the top 10 rules of hockey analytics should be. And sure enough, the #1 rule is “winning is what matters”. But rules 2-4 add additional color to that.

Law #2:  Goals for and against are the only factors that affect winning

Law #3:  Goals are random events

Law #4:  Winning has a nearly linear relationship to goal differential

If you want the Devils to make the postseason this year, you should root for them to win; but you’re going to be disappointed because they’re not making the playoffs.

If you want them to make the playoffs NEXT season, then you should use something that is going to be predictive of winning NEXT season. At minimum, that means you should look at goal differential, not win-loss record. And remember that Law #3 says goals are also somewhat random, so if there’s some component of luck that you think should regress to the mean (which is Law #6) you should factor that in as well.

Confused? Okay, here are some relevant numbers to help quantify the team’s true talent level that we can start with.

40.5 PTS% (28th) – This is their Win-Loss Record

3.03 GF/60 (15th) – Rate of goal-scoring

3.55 GA/60 (29th) – Rate of goal-allowance

44.9 GF% (25th) – Goal Share

2.91 xGF/60 (14th) – Rate of shot/chance generation

2.84 xGA/60 (14th) – Rate of shot/chance prevention

51.7 xGF% (13th) – Shot/chance Shate

If you measure a team by how many standings points they have, they’re 28th. If you measure by the goals they score and allow, the Devils are 25th. And if you measure by how many you’d expect them to score and allow, they’re 13th.

You might be thinking “expected goals don’t count, actual goals do” and that’s totally fair descriptively, but remember, we’re not trying to make the playoffs this year, we’re trying to figure out if this team is good moving forward.

And when projecting forward we should care about goals, but also scoring chances and shots. In the case of the Devils, their expected goals for are 14th in the league, which pretty closely matches their actual goals which are 15th. That means nearly all of the differential from goals to expected goals is coming from goaltending (#JustTheGoalie).

In order to think that this is a fundamental problem with the team, you have to start with the assumption that they are likely to get the same goaltending next year as this year. The bottom 3 NHL teams last year in goaltending (other than the Devils) were the Senators, Sharks, and Flyers. This year, those teams are 16th, 18th, and 19th – in other words, they’re average. The Sharks are doing it with James Reimer. The Senators are doing it with Anton Forsberg. And on the Flyers, Carter Hart just got better. 

Could Blackwood just get better like Carter Hart? Sure, why not? He’s been injured for basically two full seasons. If he gets a fully healthy season where he’s not asked to start every night even when he’s injured, it’s not unrealistic for him to put up the starter-level numbers he’s shown for stretches in the past. Could Nico Daws just get better? Absolutely. He’s a rookie that’s been thrown into a run-and-gun scheme against the best shooters in the world. He’s a solid prospect that could become a career NHLer. And if neither of them do that, could the Devils find a James Reimer or Anton Forsberg? Absolutely.

All of this is to say that, if the Devils lose a game because Jon Gillies gave up 6 goals on ~3 xGs – which happened thrice in February alone – why get pissy about it?

Is there any chance that Jon Gillies is part of this team’s long-term plan? The answer is no. So, in that game, you shouldn’t care about whether the Devils won or lost, you should care about how the guys who are going to be here next year performed.

And in this season, that sort of focus would probably leave you happy more often than not because the team’s core players – the forwards in particular – have played exceptionally well. 

Jesper Bratt, Jack Hughes, Nico Hischier, Dawson Mercer, and Yegor Sharangovich have an average age of 21.8 and they are our 5 leading scorers with 16+ goals each and 35+ points each. Hughes and Bratt are producing at a clip comparable to the league’s most elite stars. Jonas Siegenthaler is 24 and came out of nowhere to be the most valuable defensive player in the NHL this season (according to Evolving-Hockey’s defensive GAR). Oh yeah, and the Devils also have the 4th best prospect pool and the 3rd best AHL team.

This season is over. My advice is to do whatever you need to in order to cope with that reality. Go on a bender. Make a Tinder. Pick up kick-boxing. Do you booboo. But get over it because there’s a really exciting future brewing and you're missing its Genesis because you're too busy being pouty in my Twitter mentions.

So, at the risk of sounding hypocritical, put down the box score and watch the damn game, because these kids are really fun to watch.

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Editor’s note: lmaooooooooo, I love CJ for this.