With limited cap space to fit Luke Hughes onto the roster, the Devils will need to figure out a way to extend him without sacrificing the rest of the competitive core.
If you have seen the news this morning, Elliotte Friedman reported on the season finale of 32 Thoughts that Dougie Hamilton has been the topic of a few discussions between the Devils and other teams. Before you take that and run with it, this is the full quote from Friedman:
To me, the next biggest question for the Devils is Dougie Hamilton. He went from a full no move clause to a partial no trade. I’m just curious to see what happens. Uh, they paid him his bonus on July 1. I don’t have a great feel for it in terms of percentage chances that anything occurs with him. But I know his name was kind of out there a little bit. And I heard they’ve been talking to a couple teams. So we’ll see where that goes.
To me, this sounds like a low confidence level that Hamilton will actually be moved, but they at least have tried to see what Hamilton would get in return if moved. Jared brought that up as an idea a week after he wrote about trying to be aggressive with Quinn Hughes. Ever since Dawson Mercer and Ondrej Palat also found themselves on a Sportsnet trade list in early June (which I responded to, saying Mercer should not be traded), people around the hockey community — fans, writers, and reporters — have been trying to figure out who the Devils will sacrifice to create cap space for Hughes.
With $6,906,667 in cap space — or $6,931,667 if you exchange Casey on the active roster for Arseni Gritsyuk, as the Russian forward will certainly be on the team while Casey is sent to the AHL with the roster the Devils currently have — the Devils have options to cover the extra $1.1 million I would expect Hughes to ask for to match his older brother’s contract. The first is an idea that will be phased out of the NHL in the next collective bargaining agreement. Until September 15, 2026, it is a legal option in contracts.
Option One: Deferred Salary
Last year, when the Devils took a contract negotiation with Dawson Mercer into September, John wrote an article on deferred bonus payments. In that article, he cited Seth Jarvis’s then-recently signed eight-year extension with the Carolina Hurricanes, who reduced his cap hit by $480,000 per season by deferring $15.67 million from the $29.24 million in signing bonuses in his contract. John also wrote a bit about how exactly the deferred payments are calculated, which depends on Secured Overnight Financing Rate, which is currently significantly lower than when Jarvis signed his contract. If I understand the CBA’s language correctly, deferring more of the bonuses early on in the contract will create more cap savings than deferring later years because the league would calculate that the present value in 2025 to be lower than the equivalent worth of a payment in 2033.
That could create some pause in the Hughes camp. But Luke Hughes would still get his money, and the Devils would be able to sign him. Using the Jarvis contract as a reference, Hughes could be offered an eight-year, $64-million dollar contract with, say $32 million in signing bonuses. If around $18 million of the bonus structure were deferred, the Devils would be able to bring Hughes’s cap hit to around $7.5 million, or a bit less than that. If the league office approved a similar contract for Jarvis last year, I think the Devils should go down this road if Luke Hughes is willing. Using PuckPedia’s calculator, if the Devils deferred $4 million from each of the first two seasons, $3 million of both third and fourth years, and $2 million from the fifth and sixth years, they would bring Hughes to a cap hit of $7,496,313 per season, if using the SOF rate of 4.4%. You can play with that calculator a bit — and rates have recently been on the incline — but the Devils can save a lot of headache with this kind of move.
Option Two: Run a 19-Skater Roster With Kurtis MacDermid As The Emergency Fill-In Until Kovacevic’s Return
Using the $6,931,667 cap figure from having Gritsyuk on the roster over Casey, the Devils can get up to $7,731,667 in cap space by sending down extra forward Juho Lammikko. Lammikko, who was officially signed on June 15 to a one-year, one-way deal worth $800,000, does not project to be more than a fourth line player if he does make the roster. A wrinkle here is that Lammikko could refuse an assignment to the AHL and ask to return to the ZSC Lions, who had him under contract until 2028. However, anything should be on the table when it comes to creating cap space to keep the roster intact.
This option would involve a lot of Kurtis MacDermid. As you might recall, Big Mac was a defenseman for the Los Angeles Kings in his earlier days, topping out at 13:43 of ice time per night in the 2019-20 season (45 games). The Colorado Avalanche never gave him the same amount of run, maxing his ice time out at 8:20 per night in 2022-23 (44 games). NHL players do not make the league by accident, and Kurtis MacDermid is an NHL player because he is a protective presence whose decisions on the ice won’t absolutely bury his team like some of the goons that have been employed around the league over the years. Yes, his on-ice results are poor, but the more MacDermid has been asked to fill an enforcer role, the more his play has slipped. Perhaps if he is given a full role on the ice, asked to just play in the system that Sheldon Keefe is laying out for the team, he will do better.
He doesn’t need to turn into a starting-caliber defenseman in this scenario. He just needs to be able to suit up for 10-15 minutes a night, whether at forward or defense, and not be on the ice for a goal against. Whether he gets into the lineup for injury fill-in purposes or because the team wants an intimidating presence, MacDermid being able to be used in such a manner would allow the Devils to save an extra contract’s worth of cap hit for Luke Hughes’s extension.
Option Three: Place Johnny Kovacevic on LTIR at the Start of the Season
Since Johnny Kovacevic is currently recovering from knee surgery, the Devils will not have him for the start of training camp. The only thing we have heard about that has been from Tom Fitzgerald in his recent meeting with reporters on July 2, when replied to a question about Kovacevic, saying “He definitely won’t start the season, but he’s doing great,” before the conversation immediately turned to adding speed to the roster. Doing great can mean a lot of things in hockey. He could be getting ready for a November return, but depending on the ligament that needed to be repaired and the severity of his injuries, it could be longer than a six month recovery. Then, factor in what could be weeks or a couple months of skating and conditioning, and we might not see Kovacevic until after the New Year. That is just the reality of knee surgery in the NHL.
If the Devils are not expected to have Kovacevic for at least several weeks in the regular season, they could place him on long-term injured reserve. Per PuckPedia, the two ways to maximize LTIR exception space is by being as close to the cap ceiling without going over it or by being over the cap by as close as possible to Kovacevic’s cap hit of $4 million. In the former case, the Devils would have their remaining cap space prior to using LTIR subtracted from Kovacevic’s salary, and the resulting number would be their LTIR exception, which they could use to have a replacement for Kovacevic in addition to actually filling their roster with press box players. In the latter case, if the Devils are $3.8 million over the cap with a full roster, placing Kovacevic on LTIR would allow them exactly that much temporary salary pool in exception for his injury. And, as PuckPedia writes,
Once a team’s initial LTIR pool is established, any additional players going on LTIR throughout the season have their cap hit added to the existing LTIR pool.
Say the Devils keep everyone, and don’t make any trades. By putting Kovacevic on LTIR, they can keep Nico Daws on the active roster without waiving him. They can have Juho Lammikko as an extra forward. They can have Calen Addison or Dennis Cholowski as an extra defenseman. They can have Kurtis MacDermid without using him as an emergency Swiss Army knife while Kovacevic is on LTIR. They would have until Kovacevic returns to figure out what they want to do with everyone on their roster, and could then revert to the combination of Options One and Two by waiving or trading Daws, Addison, and Lammikko to get back under the cap. Or, if someone gets injured (the Devils have plenty of candidates), they would be able to cycle LTIR even after Kovacevic fully returns to the team.
Option Four: Make a Trade
It is probably not a great offseason to be Ondrej Palat, Dawson Mercer, or Dougie Hamilton. Every day, Devils fans are asking which one of these guys are going to be traded away to make room for the Luke Hughes extension. But, if matching his brother’s contract in total dollars paid is all Luke needs, I think the above shows that a trade might not even be necessary. By being creative and using the full extents of the CBA, all three of those Devils and Luke Hughes can be on the roster in September.
I do regularly say that, of those three, Ondrej Palat is my choice to get moved. Even if it involves a sweetener for a team to take his contract (though I think he would be a good fit for Pittsburgh in a hockey sense, and they have over $15 million in cap space with the lingering speculation about moving Karlsson, Rackell, or Rust), a roster that features Dougie Hamilton and Dawson Mercer is simply more likely to not only make the playoffs, but advance a round than a roster that features Ondrej Palat over one of those two players.
There is something to be said about having playoff performers rather than players who just get through the first 82 games. Ondrej Palat performed admirably in the first round against Carolina this year, but the disparity between his regular season and postseason performance leads me to question whether he literally takes it too easy in the regular season. Considering the Devils were not even that many points from missing the playoffs, the team needs to see more urgency from him in all games if he remains on the roster.
My biggest concern is with moving Dougie Hamilton. When Dougie played with either Nico Hischier or Jack Hughes at five-on-five in the 2024-25 season, the Devils outscored opponents 41-20: over a 2:1 rate. When Hischier and Hughes played without Hamilton, they combined to outscore opponents 54-51. Knowing how poor the goal margins were in the bottom six last season, the only way the Devils can guarantee making the playoffs is by maximizing the offensive output from their top centers. We hope that Connor Brown, Evgenii Dadonov, and Arseni Gritsyuk make an impact to make third-line results a lot better, but we have not seen it yet. What we have seen is that Hischier and Hamilton or Hughes and Hamilton are elite offensive combinations who dominate on a consistent basis. As our most clutch offensive producer, who consistently comes through in big situations where the Devils need a goal, Dougie Hamilton is the most irreplaceable player on the defense not named Luke Hughes. Simon Nemec might have two-way ability, but he is not there yet. Seamus Casey might score a few goals, but he is not 6’7” with elite awareness and years of experience playing with and against top NHL talent, with all the physical demands involved. Add in the question mark looming over Kovacevic, and I do not see how trading Hamilton would do anything but make the Devils take a massive step backwards.
Last Words and Your Thoughts
With all that out there, I think the best path forward for the New Jersey Devils is taking advantage of deferred salary payments in the second-to-last offseason they will be legal. If that does not do enough to keep the Devils under the cap, the Devils should see how far they can get by playing with a limited roster and utilizing LTIR space if necessary. In the case that they need to clear enough space to give Hughes a contract more lucrative than his older brother, then a trade may be absolutely necessary. As I have said before, Ondrej Palat needs to be the first to go in that scenario, even if the Devils have to attach a draft pick to him. Making that kind of trade would also allow Tom Fitzgerald to seek out more help while avoiding the use of LTIR entirely, but we have to see what direction the team is actually leaning in. For now, all we have is low-confidence rumors and vague talking.
What do you think about the options that the Devils have to fit Hughes’s extension? What routes do you see the team going down? Do you think this will actually get done soon, or will it drag into August or September? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for reading.