The Devils core learned valuable lessons, and there are plenty of takeaways from a disappointing 2023-24 campaign.
Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once said, "You can't win unless you learn how to lose."
Every season, the New Jersey Devils prepare and suit up for 82 games, and losses are inevitable over those seven months.
The club suffered 39 regulation losses in 2023-24, tied for the sixth-most in the league with the Calgary Flames.
It was a season during which there was plenty of blame to go around, from the general manager to the coaching staff and, of course, the players.
As a new season slowly inches near with each passing day, it is important to remember the lessons learned from those losses and focus on applying them to the upcoming year.
"I feel like last year, sometimes we took games for granted. When they did not go our way, we kind of shut it down and tried to focus on the next game," Curtis Lazar said to The Hockey News. "If you do that too many times, your season is over pretty quick."
"Honestly, last year was difficult," former Devil Brendan Smith said in a phone interview. "Lots of injuries. I think at one moment, we didn't have Dougie (Hamilton), Nico (Hischier), and Jack (Hughes), our three best players. We had some other guys who kind of got off to a slow start, so it became very difficult. If you don't get on a winning streak early, it is really hard to make a run at the playoffs. So I think we hit a lot of trouble."
There is no denying that last season was a failure, resulting in a head coach losing his job and the organization selling off players at the trade deadline.
Still, as Abdul-Jabbar said, you can't win unless you learn how to lose, and veteran Ondrej Palat has personal experience from his time with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
"That's exactly what we did in Tampa. We had a terrible playoff, and we got swept," Palat said. "We looked at ourselves in the mirror, made some changes, (and our) coaches made some changes in the structure."
Palat acknowledged that the team prioritized its defensive game and collectively understood that it would help them succeed in the league. Of course, Tampa went on to three straight Stanley Cup Final appearances and back-to-back championships.
The Devils can't change what happened last season but can use it as motivation moving forward, which is the hope of team captain Nico Hischier.
"I think it is a learning process, and we are still in it," he said during his end-of-season media availability. "Sometimes, even when it sucks, you can learn more than when everything is great. I hope we take it the right way and literally go home during the summer and remember the feeling we have right now and work towards turning this ship around."
The Devils core of young players learned valuable lessons over the past few months. From understanding the importance of overtime points to being mentally sharp and not taking a single game for granted, there are plenty of takeaways from their disappointing 2023-24 campaign.
Now it is up to the players to apply the individual lessons they learned so they can become a better version of themselves for 2024-25.