Jack Hughes Is Not Dumb For Suggesting The Devils Have A Chance At The Playoffs

To tank or not to tank.

That is the question for several NHL teams on the outside looking in at a playoff spot. But it's not a question for the New Jersey Devils, which, despite being 10 points back of the final wild-card spot in the East, have rattled off three straight wins at a time when non-playoff teams should be trying to lose as many games as possible.

By doing so, New Jersey went from having the seventh-best odds of winning the No. 1 overall pick in the draft to having the 10th-best odds. That's a three-place drop in the draft order.

But according to Devils center Jack Hughes, the never-say-die attitude may have increased the team's chances of being a Stanley Cup contender next year.

"We still have to be a hungry group, because we're a group that wants to be competitive for a lot of years," Hughes told reporters following a 6-3 win against the New York Rangers on Wednesday. "It's not over until it's over. We have a lot of hockey left to play. If we go on a run, we never know what's going to happen. All we can do is control what we can control. We can try to win as many games as we can and play our best. On a personal note, guys should for themselves be prideful and want to come and represent the New Jersey Devils well and hopefully want to come back here next year and play here again next year.

"It's just about personal pride and as far as the team goes, it's never over until it's over, so we just got to keep winning," he said.

According to BetMGM, the Devils' playoff odds are 46.00 (+4500) with an implied probability of 2.17 percent. As Lloyd Christmas famously said in the movie, Dumb and Dumber, "So you're telling me there's a chance."

Well, not really.

But at a time when the teams around them in the standings are shutting down superstars and giving ice time to AHLers, it's not necessarily dumb for the East's 13th-place Devils or the 11th-place Philadelphia Flyers, which have gone 7-2-1 in their last 10 games, to compete right to the end.

"We all can't wait for the building to be packed again and to play playoff games," Flyers president Keith Jones told 97.5 'The Fanatic' on Monday. "But we're also realistic on the timeline to do that. It's getting closer, there's no doubt about that, but we're not there yet."

Like the Flyers, which have had a top-seven pick in three of the last four years, the Devils have already spent time rebuilding at the bottom of the standings, drafting two first overall picks and another four top-10 picks in the past 10 years.

Another top-10 pick could certainly help. But for a young team that finished third in the Metropolitan Division a year ago and is now looking to turn the corner and get over the hump of an early playoff exit, ending the season on a high note could prove to be even more beneficial in the long run.

After all, the Columbus Blue Jackets were basically where the Devils were at this time a year ago. Instead of waving the white flag, Columbus chose to compete and ended up winning its final six games of the season. The Blue Jackets still fell short three points out of the playoffs. Not that the players deemed it a failure.

"We made a huge step forward with the team, almost made the playoffs, and feel like this season was successful from that standpoint," Columbus' Dmitri Voronkov told reporters at the time.

A year later, Columbus is back in the thick of things, just one point out of a wild-card spot. For New Jersey, which has advanced past the first round of the playoffs just once in the past 13 years, it might be a lesson in why you battle to the end.

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