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Seems like something got lost in translation, the Devils are actually pursuing Langen-brunner. I kid, I kid. I was gonna do a post this morning on the guys NJ could be looking at but truth be told Brunner should be #1 on their list. I'm less than enthused about his territorial play (basically didn't push the puck forward himself, played with Datsyuk and Zetterberg), but as I've been saying, NJ doesn't really need a guy like that, they have a bunch of guys who seem to have done that plenty last season.

My friends, as a new member, I'm nowhere near the expert some of you are, but I'll stick my neck out to offer some perspective. What are my qualifications? None, other than my legal first name is Ilia (same name as the gentleman in question, just different spelling) and I'm a native speaker of Russian, although I'm not an ethnic Russian. Neither is Kovalchuk, but I digress.... On the whole "going home" business, I'll offer this: in Russian and Russian-speaking cultures being near family is a very big deal. Big enough deal where being away starts to mess with your mind, affects your work (or in this case athletic) performance, your health, etc. I'm a rare exception to that, I subscribe to George Burns' immortal "happiness is a loving, caring family...in another city". Now, I've been following the Devils since around 1992, and what brought them much success was being a great system team. What do I mean by that? For years you could tune in a Devils game and, unless you read the sweater numbers, you had no idea which line was on the ice, because everyone played more or less the same game. This was a working team, a "blue-collar" team, if you will, and not one that relied on "superstars". More recently, however, that had changed, and the organization started leaning more towards a team of great players, rather than a great team of players. We started relying on superstars. There is nothing wrong with that, except that I don't think that approach has worked. Save for last year, the team's performance has been pretty average, certainly not near as good as it could be. So, how does one go about changing that, about going from a superstar-oriented approach to a team-oriented one? By getting rid of the superstars. I'm going to miss my namesake #17, but I'm not going to miss the mindset that resulted from his (and even Zach's) presence. Everything hung on those two (and on Marty, but that's a separate conversation), and I don't think ultimately that's very healthy. This latest development gives the team a chance to do a master reset, a Ctrl-alt-del. There is now the money and, more importantly, the necessity to rethink things, to look at new ideas without worrying about how so-and-so will play with #17 or what not. Hopefully, this will finally force the organization to start developing some young talent, something they've been slow to do. Between that and the fact that we've finally acknowledged that Marty is not immortal (by acquiring Mr. Schneider), I'm cautiously optimistic. Will this hurt in the short term? Sure. Will the benefits outweigh the losses? Only time will tell, but I think they just might.

Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way. There was clearly a drop off in goals last year, as expected with the loss of Parise, now this year we'll be twice the drop off, as Clarky and Kovy are departing. With these three key figures gone, the style of play that brought us to the SCF will probably no longer work. So, instead of trying to create offense by signings, and signings, mind you of a weak FA class, we should work with what we have, and revert back to our old ways. The Neutral Zone Trap folks. With the lack of goal scoring last year, we may as well have played the trap. So what I'm proposing, is put together a group of big, physical forwards (maybe sign Penner and put him in a bottom six, grinder role, maybe on a line with Carter and Bernier) and let our strong suit, our defensemen and the Marty/Schneider win us games.

Id want barch and janssen in the lineup, fvck the end score

Looks like it is time for zajac and henrique to kick it up another level.

Amazingly, the only Kovalchuk merch I own is a player tee with the SCF patch on it (Thankfully I have a Zubrus one too, so I still have a SCF shirt in rotation). I guess being a desperately poor grad student paid off...ish...?

i would never wear my kovy jersey again the man showed everyone how much of a total fvcking scum bag he is and disrespected all of the fans and the entire organization with that pile of sh!t he left us in.. i would be ashamed to wear that fvcking thing to the rock id rather not wear a jersey at all.

Out of all this, I'm glad he's going to a completely different league and there wasn't some convoluted way he got out of playing for us and got a load of money to play against us. At least there's no fear of that... all else aside, this sucks royally...

I somewhat agree with that sentiment. I much preferred when had topics as topics, and self-policed a bit... Now, the general thought is to cram everything in one topic, and have multiple conversations going on at once. And I get it, we don't want 50 topics of every possible player that could sign here... but at the same time, the idea for the comprehensive thread came from the trade deadline day and free agency... where there are signings/trades every 5 minutes or so... that had nothing to do with the Devils.

First my clarkson jersey now my kovalchuck i should just start burning my money it would be a lot quicker

Sorry, but having the Russians go home will not kill the NHL. More North Americans in the league, the better.

Volchenkov should defect to Russia too, and at the same time Salvador morphs into Nick Lidstrom and bammm...we're in business.