This season, the Devils have a jam packed October. If they don’t want to fall into a big hole, they need to start strong right out of the gate.
There are not a ton of things that the 2023-24 New Jersey Devils did well that the 2024-25 version wants to duplicate. One thing that did go well last season, however, was a quick start. The Devils last season started off October by going 5-2-1. They started right where they left off after the playoff run the season prior and were sitting in a good spot come November 1st. Things went off the rails later on, of course, but if the current Devils want to look back at something that happened last season and duplicate it, a quick start would be a great choice.
The start of this season is unique with the Devils playing their first two games overseas in Czechia then getting a little mini-bye for travel back to the States before playing again 5 days later, so things will be slightly different than usual, and they will be playing more games in October than what is normal. Nonetheless, a good start is perhaps even more vital this season than last, as this team needs to get rid of the bad taste of last season as quickly as possible. A slow start could spiral if they get into a rut, and they could quickly find themselves behind in the standings by a bunch of games, a tough proposition to overcome.
Given that, let’s check out the October schedule this year and how their opponents fared last season.
So the big initial thing to notice is the sheer number of games the team has in October. Last season the Devils had 7 October games; they have 13 this season, nearly double. This only increases the importance of a good start exponentially, as a poor October now puts the team way behind the 8-ball given that’s 13 games of poor play versus only 7.
Next, the actual schedule of opponents is tougher this season as well. Last year, the Devils had a fairly soft October with only 2 games against opponents who made the playoffs the season prior. This year, almost half of the games are against playoff teams from a season ago, and another one of those games is against Detroit who missed out simply on tiebreakers. There are a few easier opponents mixed in as well, especially the final two games of the month against Anaheim and San Jose which need to be wins, but those easier games are fewer and far between compared to the tougher matchups.
Depending on how you look at it, perhaps one positive is that despite playing 13 games this month, the team only has two back-to-backs. “Only” might be a strong word, as playing 4 of 13 games in back-to-backs is not really a small percentage. But given that NJ always gets straddled with an outsized portion of back-to-backs compared to other teams in the league thanks to shorter average flight times, just having two of these scenarios in the month is largely doable. The annoying part about them, however, is that both require travel from one game to the next. The first has the team flying from Newark to Raleigh, and the other from Detroit to Newark. So in reality, that makes those games against Carolina and the Isles that much tougher, and both were strong teams last season already.
In the end, it is a fairly brutal month of October for the New Jersey Devils. They have a jam-packed schedule, and it is largely against quality opponents except at the very end of the month. For the Devils to enter November with a good record, they will need to be considerably better than they were at almost any point last season. They will frankly need to play like the playoff team we saw two seasons ago. If they do not, they might end October buried in the standings already, and that would be a tough hill to climb for a club that is coming off a very underwhelming and disappointing 2023-24. This cannot be a season where they slowly ramp up to being good. Given this schedule, they need to be good almost immediately. Let’s see if they can pull it off.