David does his best with what he’s given. The coaching staff tells him that’s good, tells him he’s playing well, living up to expectations. David finds that faintly insulting, considering he’s not particularly impressed with his own play.

But David gets better. He picks up the easy saucers from Levesque, the bone-jarring slap passes Farmer has a tendency to dish, learns that waiting out Knutsen and letting him hang himself is the best way to get the puck in the back of the net.

When training camp is over, the team’s marginally tighter, and David is still there, earning chirps and grudging admiration from some of the veteran players. There’s frantic, premature speculation from the local media that he’ll be the difference maker for the team, especially when the preseason starts and he’s averaging over a point a game, more assists than goals by far.

There’s no question of sending David down at the beginning of the regular season; it’s become clear that they don’t have the depth in the roster they’d need to give him time to develop. When the puck drops in October, he’s standing on the ice during the anthem, feeling faintly nauseated. Maybe he looks it, because Kurmazov tapped him hard on the helmet when they were heading out of the locker room, nudged him forward with a pat on the ass, more gentle than usual.

David doesn’t think he makes much of an impression in his first game, but he knows he does in the second, tunes out the jeers from the Newark crowd and gets a pass from Farmer that just needs a gentle nudge, a hard-angled side of the net tap-in that Gloucester never even sees. The puck ends up in his hands after the game, the date sloppily written out in silver sharpie, and David can’t stop touching it, the Devils’ logo smooth under his thumb.

David may start strong, but the Islanders don’t. They only eke out two wins and two additional loser points in their first ten games, a streak of games so ugly they’re lucky to have managed that. But they’re scoring, at least. Their first two lines are good enough offensively to bandage some of the defensive failures, and the bottom six are throwing hits that rattle bone, Brouwer leading the league in that category.

If you look at anything but the final scores, anything but the defence, anything but goaltending, they’re doing fine. David’s doing fine, more than fine, has seven points in his first ten games, not the one-for-one pace he’d set in the preseason, but these games actually mean something, so he’ll take it.

But if David starts strong, Lourdes starts like a bullet. The Panthers aren’t playing much better than the Islanders, the same defensive gaps, the same weakness in net, but the Panthers go out in flames every time, tally endlessly, just to give up more. There’s no point even trying to switch up their goalies when one lets four in; his replacement will just let in the fifth.