The Devils Are Like A Dead, Dead Rose

We feel like we’ve been strangely silent about the Devils so far this season, so we’d like to take a moment away from our just-started Dallas travelogue slideshow to share with you our thoughts about the putrid pile of puke that is our favorite hockey team.

– The Devils are like a red, red rose. If you are allergic to roses. And it’s got bees in it. Killer bees. And you keep forgetting that it’s covered in thousands of those little tiny thorns that get stuck in your skin and feel like white-hot metal barbs even though they’re practically microscopic. And if you don’t realize that the little tiny thorns stuck under your skin are probably covered in teensy tiny bee eggs, so then the bees hatch inside your skin. The Devils are like that.

– The Devils are like that awful co-worker who knows exactly how much time has passed since his or her working test period or last disciplinary action so that he or she knows exactly when he or she can break the rules, or show up to work late and/or drunk and/or high, or yell at customers, or steal stuff from someone else’s desk, all without being fired. Like clockwork, they can be counted on to perform when they absolutely have to so as to not get canned, but the rest of the time they’re only known for being unreliable. We can only assume the Devils knew that the game in Anaheim corresponded to the end of their probationary period. If they lost that game, people would have been held accountable. But since they won, their boss could only rip up the already drafted “written notice” and start anew. And thanks to all the injuries, they know they have a built-in excuse for poor performance, but instead of just letting it lie there, they’re going to try to play it for sympathy. You know that type — totally manipulative, lazy, self-centered, and falsely entitled.

– The Devils are like that bad book you should have put down 25 pages ago. The plot drags, the characters are boring, and whatever you’re thinking might happen to make it better if you just give it one more chapter doesn’t. But it’s not even like it’s bad in an interesting way, where you could get angry at the characters, or keep reading in the hopes that misfortune will rain down on them, or that the writing is so horrid that it’s laughable. It’s just bad.

– The Devils are like the team in the NHL with the worst captain. Seriously, how is it even possible to quantify how terrible a captain Langer is? The best part is the way he bitches every time the fans boo the Devils at The Rawk, because if he played in a market that was even just the tiniest bit more intense, he would have been stripped of his C ages ago. He’s a captain who pouted publicly after getting a “maintenance day” in an essentially meaningless game at the end of last season. He’s a captain who scores on average less than 18 goals a season (and less than 50 points total), but who has had coaches fired for not playing him on the top line. He’s a captain whose team has looked listless, unprepared, uncaring, and gutless in every (brief) postseason during his reign of terror. Wait, now that we mention it, the Devils aren’t like the team in the NHL with the worst captain, they are the team in the NHL with the worst captain.

– The Devils are like a team of idiots who are constantly trying to one-up each other with how idiotic they can be. Why is it every year there’s some guy who gets a summertime injury, but who waits until the regular season to get surgery on it? Zach’s knee injury is like a virtuoso performance at that particular game; Langer and Patty with their sports-hernia/groin surgeries are probably seething mad that they didn’t think of it. (And while we’re on the subject of injuries, we should add that the Devils are like the Flyers of the mid-’90s, in that their medical staff seems to be a bunch of malicious quacks. Wait, malicious quacks? Dr. Chuck the Duck, we presume?)

– The Devils are like the lentil balls in yogurt we got from the Indian place tonight. There were good ingredients in those lentil balls, like lentils and yogurt, and, um, tamarind? But they were really sort of disgusting. Because those ingredients weren’t working together like an orchestra. And whoever created the recipe decided they should be served ice cold. WTF? Basically, the chef had a decent starting point, but then fucked every step up along the way. That dish was a systematic failure wrapped in lentils drenched in yogurt tamarind sauce.

– The Devils are like an orchestra. An orchestra led by someone who doesn’t know anything about musical instruments, the people who play them, and, well, music in general. We had been pretty psyched for the Devils to do the same thing this year that the Flyers did that year they sucked so bad and finally fired Bobby Clarke. We hoped that sweeping changes would be made with the inner workings of the organization to finally wrest the team out of the past’s cold, dead hands and launch it into a bright future. And then the bloated corpses of the late-contract veterans would be shipped out of town to desperate renters in exchange for tasty prospects and future all-stars. And the season would end with a top-two draft pick. And then we’d all wake up the next season and have a team that goes to the ECF. But then we remembered this is the Devils. There are no organizational changes with the Devils. They don’t move expiring-contract UFAs for draft picks or prospects (because really, who would want draft picks or even just a live body under the age of 23 when we can keep the band together for one more five-game loss in the first round?). And if they got a top-two draft pick, Lou would stand there at the podium at the Draft, wearing that “cat that got the canary” smirk, while shocking the hockey world by going off the board to draft Adrian Foster’s older, less-talented, more chronically-injured brother.

– The Devils are like a team that plays in a state that’s about to start selling Devils-themed license plates! Woo-hoo! Seriously, for all this, we are some kind of psyched for license plates.

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