NJ Devils are totally firing John Hynes, right?
The New Jersey Devils lost their fifth game in a row on Thursday night, and we might have reached the nadir of their season: Defeated by the Colorado Avalanche, which earned their 19th win in 66 games.
Granted, the Devils aren’t that much better, with 25 wins in 67 games. They haven’t won a game since Feb. 18, a time when, rather miraculously, they were only four points out of the last wild card spot in the East. Since then, they’ve gone 0-7-2, and are only one point away from the conference basement.
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And boy, was coach John Hynes not happy after that loss to the Avalanche!
“I’ll make this one easy for you. We weren’t ready to play in the first period,” he said, via NorthJersey.com
“It’s preparation to play and that was part of it. Cory played really well. He was ready to go in the first. We know what happened there. We played well in the second and third. As I said, the difference between winning and losing, we got a good goaltending performance in the first period, we weren’t ready to play, we worked to tie up and then, the most crucial point of the game, we have a real lackadaisical play and it cost us the game.”
Now, mental preparation for a game would seem to be rather high on a coach’s to-do list, but even a motivator like Hynes can’t take the paddles to the heart of a team out of the playoffs and facing an opponent against whom they felt they could sleepwalk to a victory.
Still, in Hynes’s second season, it’s been another horror show.
The Devils are second-to-last in the NHL in goals scored with 146. They’re third-to-last in points percentage at .463; the last time the Devils were this bad was in 1988-89, when they finished with a .413 points percentage, one year after making the playoffs for the first time. Jim Schoenfeld, the guy that got them there, lasted the full season before being fired in Nov. 1989.
The general manager then was Lou Lamoriello, and I thought of him as the Devils skated to a loss against the worst team on the planet last night: Would he have fired Hynes already? Would the GM who had 21 coaching changes with the Devils have turfed him before this lost season?
The Old Lou would have, because his goal was always to be one of the nine or so teams that contend for a championship each season. The New Lou, the one that has the Toronto Maple Leafs near the playoffs, clearly has an appreciation for how tanking a season can hasten your improvement as a franchise.
So maybe he would have kept Hynes, for the diminishing returns.
And after two years, it’s safe to say that Hynes isn’t getting anything out of this group. He’s someone’s good coach, but not for this team.
Granted, GM Ray Shero hasn’t given him a hell of a lot to work with, Taylor Hall trade aside; and Hynes has had to deal with a rookie-laden lineup that hasn’t played to expectations. (Miles Wood excepted, Pavel Zacha as the example). But what Hynes wanted this team to do vs. its execution is pretty stark.
Here’s what he told me in Summer 2015, on the Devils and his coaching philosophy:
We want to be an attacking team offensively, but the word “attacking” doesn’t just mean scoring goals. It means defensively, you’re quick. You’re eliminating time and space. When you have an attack mentality, it is about going to the other team’s net and pressuring them. But we don’t want to be passive defensively.
As coaches, it’s not whether an offensive coach or a defensive coach. The game is transitional. We want to be a team that takes pride in how we play on both sides of the puck. When we don’t have the puck, we want to have some responsibility and structure.
So, like, best laid plans and all of that.
The “attack mentality” has produced a shots-for percentage of 46.97, meaning the Devils take 46.97 percent of the shots at 5-on-5. That’s only above the Avalanche and the Coyotes. Last season, that percentage was 46.35 percent. So … improvement? But still third-worst.
From a possession standpoint … yikes. The Devils went from a 47.19 percent in the year before Hynes to a 46.17 percent last season to 46.86 this season. So a little bump, but still the second-worst possession percentage in the League, ahead of only Arizona. If nothing else, it’s indicative for three years of a bad roster.
They’re also second-worst in the NHL to Arizona in offensive zone starts at 5-on-5, starting just 28.8 percent of their shifts in the attacking zone. For comparison’s sake, the Los Angeles Kings are first at 36.9 percent).
Now, defensively, the Devils had to deal with an uncharacteristic horrible start for Cory Schneider this season, which was a contributor to their middling GAA (2.84, No. 22 in the NHL) this season. They’re No. 20 in shots against per 60 minutes (30.73).
But the quality of those shots against is the concern: Only Cam Talbot (who has played seven more games) and Freddie Andersen (who has two more games) have faced more mid-danger shot attempts than Schneider in his 52 games. (They’re better on high-danger chances, as Schneider has seen about as many as Carey Price at 233, while Talbot has seen an absurd 322.)
So the Devils are a putrid offensive team and a below average defensive team, saved by their standout goalie when he’s on.
Is this Hynes’s fault, and does any of it improve if he’s gone, given the roster and the state of the rebuild?
Overall, I’d go with “yes.” Two seasons with the same sorts of results are troubling, even if it’s part of a three-year downward trend. The Devils shouldn’t be nearly this bad. And Hynes is on track to have coached them to two of their four worst offensive seasons in franchise history.
But let’s be honest about two factors here.
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First, it benefits the Devils to suck this season, given the state of the roster. And it’s not as if their ownership isn’t practiced in the dark arts of tanking. So Hynes presiding over a team in a multi-year mire is sorta the plan, sad as it is to say.
Second, he’s Ray Shero’s guy. Literally. Shero said he was the only candidate for the Devils’ job two years ago. They worked together with the Pittsburgh Penguins. There’s a loyalty and a friendship there. To fire Hynes after two seasons — he’s currently 63-66-20 — would be Shero admitting he failed his first test as general manager, even if the grade was assigned two years later. Because he’s obviously not going to throw himself under that bus.
What do they do? Probably fire him, in order to add a little new energy to a moribund team for next season. To add a little direction to a franchise whose plan, as it stands, seems to be a combination of … what? Flipping veterans for thirds at the deadline, trying to get a high first-rounder in a draft that doesn’t have a McDavid or a Matthews, and maybe throwing a Brinks truck at Kevin Shattenkirk to play 24 minutes a night for seven seasons?
In Ray We Trust?
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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
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