Lou, Lou, Lou...

“They're playing like an ordinary team, but I remember that was the case two seasons ago”

Coach Claude Julien said that. Not yesterday in reference to his New Jersey Devils, but in November 2005 about an opponent while coaching the Montreal Canadiens.

Funny how things like that can come back to bite you, and this morning a big wet bite was taken out of the coach’s backside by Devils GM Lou Lamoriello, who called not to say “hang in there,” but to serve Julien his pink slip.

New Jersey has been playing like an ordinary team this past month, posting a 6-6-2 record in March after a 10-3-0 record in February. Worse, while the Devils had an 11-point lead on the Pittsburgh Penguins at the end of February, they found themselves looking up – 100 points to 101 – to the Penguins as the month of April began.

For a team with such a high standard of performance as the Devils, it was an ominous sign, one supposes, indicating that the club wasn’t as finely tuned for the playoffs as Lamoriello would have liked.

It isn’t as if Lamoriello hasn’t done this before. In 2000 he fired coach Robbie Ftorek with four games left in the regular season, replacing him with Larry Robinson. The Devils went on to win the Cup. In January 2002 he fired Larry Robinson, less than a year after coming within a victory of winning consecutive Stanley Cups. Robinson would be brought back after the lockout for another tour upon the illness of Pat Burns, but resigned in December 2005 over health issues. Lamoriello took the reins for the last 50 games of the season, taking the club into the second round of the playoffs.

While the previous two coaching changes – those of Burns and Robinson – were born out of medical necessity, there is something unsettling about this change. Lamoriello’s body of work is virtually without peer among active general managers. Four appearances in the last 11 Stanley Cup finals – with three victories to show for them – and perennial rankings among Cup favorites certify his talent at building a winning tradition.

But this has the whiff of something different. Lamoriello hamstrung his club badly by straining his salary cap position to start the year. While he was able to squirm out from under the crushing contracts of Vladimir Malakhov and Alexander Mogilny – a potential $7.1 million cap hit to his club – thus allowing him to re-sign the likes of Brian Gionta and others, the Devils have spent much of the year still brushing the tops of their helmets against the cap. While teams like Pittsburgh were adding a Gary Roberts and the Rangers a pest such as Sean Avery and a defenseman such as Paul Mara, the Devils were left with no flexibility at the trading deadline, making a pair of relatively inconsequential deals to move players for mid-round draft picks.

In the March results, the writing might have been on the wall that this crop of Devils had maxed out its potential, and that it was largely running on the fumes of what Martin Brodeur could provide. And he was 6-6-2 with uncharacteristic 2.92 GAA and .895 save percentage numbers.

It is Lamoriello’s team, and in a perverse sense there is nobility in his taking the controls. Claude Julien is unemployed this evening, but it hardly seems his fault. The seeds of this firing were sown last summer with the team Lamoriello bequeathed to his coach.