With the Devils off to a miserable start, Fan Confidence has been plummeting. First there's been denial, now the acceptance of the team playing horribly. There's been fanposts about the problems, accepting that the team isn't exactly the Stanley Cup contender that the fanbase has expected and that head coach John MacLean should be fired. Underneath the blog's logo (top left corner), there's a fan confidence poll that users can vote on. With the recent fan confidence poll being tallied a few days ago, I've decided to take a look at the fan confidence poll over the last couple of weeks. The weekly fan confidence poll score can be viewed on SBNation New York if you want to see the current scores. Note: I'm estimating a lot of the previous fan confidence values, so some of the values might not be correct.
September 20th, 2010: Fan confidence at 88 (out of 100)- Devils have yet to play a game, pre-season or regular season.
September 27th, 2010: Fan Confidence at 85- After pre-season losses to the Flyers, and the Rangers (Twice)
October 4th, 2010: Fan Confidence at 82- After pre-season victories against the Flyers and the Islanders, but a loss to the same Isles to close out the pre-season.
October 11th, 2010: Fan Confidence at 48- After the opening night loss in OT to the Dallas Stars, and an ugly 7-2 loss to the Washington Capitals. Understandable considering the team blew a game after leading early, as well as a blowout to a rival team like the Capitals this early in the season.
October 18th, 2010: Fan Confidence at 48- The Devils registered their first victory of the season against the Buffalo Sabres, despite only having 16 skaters. Unfortunately, the team wasn't able to beat the Penguins with 15 skaters, or the Bruins and the Avalanche with 18 skaters. Though the biggest news of the week happened to be the injury to Brian Rolston, which temporarily improved the team's cap situation.
October 25th, 2010: Fan Confidence at 31- Despite the Devils' victory against the Canadiens, the negatives outweighed the positives: an ugly loss to the Sabres, a loss to our hated rivals, and the drama over Ilya Kovalchuk being scratched from a game for being late to a meeting ended up causing the massive drop off in fan confidence.
Right now, what do you think of the team? Are you surprised that the team's doing so badly? Are you unhappy with the team playing such horrible hockey? Can you still be optimistic about the team at this point?