The jelly jar hit the wall in the visiting dressing room at the Wachovia Center hard, smashing into bits and leaving chunks of goo on the designer suits belonging to the Devils players.

The incident itself was not a surprise. Given the poor effort late in Game 4 and the 3-1 deficit to a Flyers team that barely made the postseason, a few of the players probably wanted to trash the place themselves.

But the source of the flying jam was not in a uniform. It was a furious Lou Lamoriello who punctuated a tirade at the coaches by grabbing the jar off the postgame spread and hurling it to its sticky end.

The mess was cleaned up before most of the players got out of the nearby locker room, according to several people around the team who did not want to incur the team general manager’s wrath by talking about it.

The message, however, was obvious to everyone: Lamoriello had built this team with a fourth Stanley Cup championship in mind, not an unthinkable third straight exit in the first round.

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The results in this series are not merely shocking. They are unacceptable to the man in charge.

“This is not easy on anybody, put it that way,” said goaltender Martin Brodeur, who said he heard about the postgame incident but did not see the damage. “We worked really hard to be in the position we were in to start the playoffs, and to see it disappear, it’s tough on everybody.”

Lamoriello refused to confirm or deny his moment of anger, falling back on oft-repeated refrain in sports: “What happens in the locker room happens there,” the Devils czar said.

He could hardly be faulted for his disgust. It is one thing for the Devils to fall behind 3-1 in the first round, even against a team that had to qualify for the playoffs on the final day.

It is another entirely to lose the way they did in Game 4, to see a two-goal deficit in the third period and give up. Head coach Jacques Lemaire admitted as much today: The Devils, hit with adversity on the road, thought the deficit was too big. They quit trying.

That has to be the worst thing anyone could say about a Lamoriello team. He built three Cup winners on defense, discipline and desire, and the Devils showed little of the three in those final minutes.

“Nobody is feeling sorry for ourselves,” Lamoriello said. “Nobody is looking left or right at each other. We just have to find a way to get it done.”

The Devils are a win-now team that is not winning now. They are 5-14 in their last 19 playoff games, and since last winning the Cup in 2003, have reached the second round just twice.

They have a beautiful new building that rakes in more than $1 million each playoff game. But the franchise that played 73 games in May and June from 1994 to 2003 has just had seven games in May since then, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be turning the calendar this spring, either.

The players fielded questions today about the Devils team that overcame the 3-1 deficit to the Flyers in the conference finals 10 years ago, about whether they can repeat that starting Thursday night.

The sad truth is, most of the Devils are only familiar with losing to a lower-seeded team early in the playoffs. For the young players on this team, that stirring comeback in Philly might as well have happened in the Original Six days. This is the only postseason they know.

“I don’t think you ever look back,” Lamoriello said. “Our focus, it’s not on where we are or what our situation is. It’s on what we can do about it.”

But what can they do about it? Lamoriello thought he had addressed his team’s biggest deficiency, adding an elite goal-scorer in Ilya Kovalchuk during the season and giving up promising young players to do it.

Kovalchuk added $1.5 million in salary to the payroll, and since he is an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season, is almost certainly a one-year rental. The GM did it with the expectation that this team would be a contender, not the latest first-round flop.

Lamoriello failed to upgrade the team at center and, most glaringly, on defense, areas that have been exposed this series. He laughed at a question about the window closing on the Brodeur Era — “How can he be aging? He won 45 games!” he said — but the backbone of his team is almost 38.

Maybe the Devils can feed off the fury of their boss and win three straight games, something they haven’t done in 2010. Maybe that smashed jelly jar will be the turning point, just like an

.

For now, it’s just another mess, just like the team itself.



Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@starledger.com, or follow him at Twitter.com/NJ_StevePoliti