FanHouse PatrikElias

Tomas Surovy played 126 games in the NHL, scoring 27 goals over parts of three seasons with the Pittsburgh Penguins. He hasn't suited up in North America since the 2005-06 campaign, and has spent the past three years playing for Lulea HF and Linkoping HC of the Swedish Elite League.

He's also representing his native Slovakia at the World Championships in Switzerland. Why is this relevant? Because during Saturday's 8-0 loss to the Czech Republic, Surovy had a meltdown of sorts and took out his frustrations on teammate Jaroslav Halak. Video after the jump.

Exactly 1,230 regular season games have been played. We're down to the best eight teams in each conference. The Stanley Cup Playoffs begin Wednesday night with four series lid-lifters.

In the Eastern Conference, the Boston Bruins rallied from a bit of a swoon around the All-Star Break to easily win the top seed. Even if you subscribe to the idea of Boston being favored because of their strong overall record, there are no sure things in these here playoffs. Who will threaten to knock the Bruins off their pedestal?

You might not have noticed while the Devils have made a case for themselves as legitimate Stanley Cup contenders, winning 16 of their last 19 games and residing squarely amongst the league's top-10 offenses, but the team has gone through a bit of crisis of identity with their offense lately.

Basically, the line of Travis Zajac, Zach Parise, and Jamie Langenbrunner had been carrying the team. Entering Saturday, that line had combined for four of the team's six goals in the team's last four games including two ugly shutouts by Florida and the Islanders. Coach Brent Sutter reshuffled his bottom three lines in the most recent contest against the Panthers. Judging by the box score of Saturday's 7-2 win, it seems to have worked.

---

---

It's been said that hockey fans have an inferiority complex. If that's true, Devils fans are doubly tortured, as they and their team are the subject of abuse among league loyalists. We're blamed for the degradation of the NHL, the perception that hockey is boring, and indirectly causing not one, but two labor stoppages.

And yeah, maybe the Devils have leaned on defense a lot over the years, but they've also succeeded with offense (in 2000-2001 they led the league with 295 goals). When they hired coach Brent Sutter in 2007, it was supposed to be a new era for the Devils -- new arena, new emphasis on offense, yet the results were depressingly same-y -- 206 goals (2.51 per game).

But in Sutter's second year, the team is making those old knocks on the Devils irrelevant (unless you've got some attendance jokes, in which case the dead horse is over there in the corner).

Through 31 games, the Devils have 99 goals (3.2 per game), good enough for 10th in the league, though every team above them except the Blackhawks has played more games. That's a pace of 262 goals, 15 better than the "amazing" offense the Penguins put together last year. In December, the team is averaging 3.9 goals per. And they're doing it in flashy ways.

So, um, why? How?

With his victory in Philadelphia on Saturday night, Martin Brodeur finally joined Patrick Roy in the 500-Win Club and set his 35-year-old eyes on eventually breaking St. Patrick's NHL record of 551 wins. Brodeur's critics will no doubt mark the occasion by pointing out he's having one of his worst seasons statistically as a pro and by raising the usual gripes about his being the overrated product of a defensive system. (Roy's wins, of course, never came while he was playing behind guys named Chelios or Carbonneau or Schneider or Foote or Bourque, and always came when he was playing for firewagon hockey teams with the stalwart defensive responsibility of Arena Bowl XX. Uh-huh...)

Brodeur's supporters, meanwhile, will point out that this season he's playing behind a Devils defense corps with the solidity of wet single-ply toilet tissue and, overall, a squad in the midst of a frustrating transition under Coach Brent Sutter. With his team playing inconsistent hockey -- and on some nights, that's putting it kindly -- the first-year NHL head coach has blasted the Devils' old ways and publicly criticized veteran players like Patrik Elias that have underperformed this season.

But would Sutter ever turn his ire to Brodeur, the team's biggest star and its unquestioned soul? And if so, what would be the consequences?