I’ll give everyone their due that they are entitled to opinions but there is some tosh floating about also. The Devils had the most fights of any team in the league. If someone no choices Conway in the final they sit for 17 minutes not 5. Lordo’s teams took exactly the same criticism of being soft with Lordo constantly being accused of having players on a leash. You can’t re write history to fit your narrative. I understand frustration and that it wasn’t enjoyable to watch a team that appeared to so easily fail to turn up on some nights but some of the sentiment is cods wallop. They were a team that wasn’t good enough to win this season due to multiple failings but they weren’t that bad a team also when you take a step back. I think they achieved about what the sum of the parts allowed them to do. Take Lordo’s teams and Devils had league MVP and First line all stars through out. This team quite simply didn’t have those guys in it.
Point is they aren’t a championship team so the changes will have to be a little more root and branch than tweaking a winning team. Issues need to be fixed but also another jump on top of that again. But some paint this year as an outright disaster and it just wasn’t. Apart from Belfast who else’s team’s season would you want over what you got. Guildford maybe but then the league gap wasn’t far off in the end and they panned the play offs so I honestly think you’d struggle. It’s not like Devils are on a slippy slide to oblivion but rather didn’t reach the level of hopeful expectation. Get a number of things right and they are on the way back. As for the rhetoric on fan support then again because as long standing fans you are frustrated don’t think that constitutes a massive issue. Devils just had their highest attended season of all time.
Yep, that's nailed it for me.
The league title should always be our aim, but we haven't got a divine right to win it and some of the comments about both this team and other teams have been cringeworthy.
Interesting you mentioned Guildford - I was chatting with a lot of their fans at the weekend and without exception they were moaning about how soft the team was when put under pressure. I enjoy watching them play but part of that is that you always know that if you hit them where it hurt you had a chance. BY contrast Belfast were not nice to watch but you just knew that they would come back at you no matter how much on the ropes they looked.
For me, the problem at the moment is that we are between identities. In the BBT we were a rock 'em, sock 'em team which was good fun to watch but was never going to win us the league, then we changed to a puck possession team under Lordo which was super successful, although not always the greatest to watch. The Skalde era didn't really happen and now we have Dupont where we are focused a bit more on containment but for whatever reason didn't consistently work. I suspect part of the problem was that the combination of players didn't quite work and there appeared to be a few who didn't buy into it.
For next season we need a far stronger identity as a team. For me the most interesting signings will be Cox and Sanford. Super players both but they belong to a very specific style. If they are back I suspect our style will stay similar, if they move on then I wonder if we will go a different direction.