You can fixate and freak out on the specific players named all you want. I agree that Schneider is largely his own issue. But the bigger question is if the “teaching” is getting through. The coach sets the environment.
I’ve mentioned player development as nonlinear many times myself. But that mindset you chalk up to natural inclinations is exactly what you build off of. Indict the old regime all you want but the standard set by the most resilient (not even best) players absolutely led the way for lesser and younger players to get better and the idea holds true for every single consistent team in the league today. Point, McAvoy, etc. are not the players they are without good habits coming from the top down. The uneven performances of Hynes’ team as far as the basic elements of the game is not a bad streak nor growing pains. It’s a characteristic. The team only executes when their backs are against the wall, which is exactly how you characterize a lack of professionalism. You can’t automatically chalk inconsistency up to growth. It’s a team that half of the time does not know where the red line is before dumping the puck into the zone. That kind of lack of attention to detail - and it’s three years of that, coming from players or various levels of experience.
And players always know when a coach is FOS regardless of generation. It’s just when someone supposedly speaks their language the FOS realization comes too late.
This is like Lemaire making the trains run on time - I just don't believe that the Devils ice the puck at a significantly higher rate now than they did 20 years ago, relative to the league average. It's just that they lose a lot more games now because they're a worse team. They don't have a top down mindset because they don't have enough good players - it's much easier to create a culture like that when you have better players and the team wins a lot of games. So you'll say it's not a chicken or egg, which came first idea, you'll say it's something that teams develop, fine - I don't really believe there's a team that 'loses well' - I guess a team with bad goaltending might, but most people will chalk up bad goaltending to bad defense. The 2015-16 Devils lost well because they were a severely limited offensive team that played responsible defense and had a great goalie and they managed to finish with a decent record despite the fact that it's 4 years later and only 9 skaters on that team are still NHL regulars. Fine. It's possible to do.
A lot of these players are still young, and a lot of these players will learn. Some of them won't. I think the coaching staff is willing to live with the little mistakes for now as long as big things are being accomplished.
I also believe that the supposed inconsistency is because the team plays a fundamentally high-risk game. They have the offensive horses to do that and that's how they play - some nights it doesn't work and they look really bad doing it. The nights where it didn't work for the old regime is where they'd have 16 shots and score 0 or 1 goals. That looks bad too, but it's a different bad, and I think Devils fans haven't figured out the different bad yet.
