Do you remember the days before the 2009-2010 season, when Devils players were actually allowed to build chemistry in established line combinations?  There have been some great Devils lines, some even with catchy nicknames courtesy of Doc Emrick. 


In an effort to distract myself from the current Kovalchuk situation, I was trying to imagine putting together an all-time Devils team built not just from their best players, but from actual line combinations that played together fairly often.  After much thought, here is what I came up with:

Line 1:  ("The A Line")     LW - Elias            C - Arnott           RW - Sykora

Line 2:  ("ZZ Pops")         LW - Parise           C - Zajac           RW - Langenbrunner

Line 3:                           LW - Pandolfo       C - Madden      RW - Brylin

Line 4:  ("Crash Line")    LW - Peluso          C - Holik            RW - McKay

I obviously opted for a more defensive oriented 3rd line, but I debated having a 3rd scoring line that would feature Richer / Carpenter / Lemieux.  Of course I also considered the "EGG Line" of Elias / Gomez / Gionta, but a) I still hate Scott Gomez too much and b) I didn't feel comfortable double-shifting Elias in this hypothetical roster.  I think that Kirk Muller and Aaron Broten used to play together, but I'm not sure who completed that line.  And I couldn't remember who used to center Rolston and Guerin but I think they were a good combo as well.

Then I got thinking about defensive pairings.  This was a bit harder but I ultimately decided on:

D1:   Stevens  & Rafalski

D2:   Niedermayer & White 

D3:   Driver & Daneyko

This was complicated because I thought that Niedermayer used to play a lot with Stevens too (which would make a clear D1 pairing), but then who could I match up Rafaski with?  This in turn led me to settle on White as a partner for Niedermayer, which I'm not thrilled about.

It goes without saying that there's only one choice for Goalie (no, not Corey Schwab). 

I'm curious to hear what other people think.  I'm sure there are some other great combos I haven't thought of.