For most of this NHL offseason, I have been very patient with the New Jersey Devils in their negotiation with Luke Hughes. I promoted the idea of keeping Hughes’s cap hit down via deferred salary (as the Carolina Hurricanes have done with multiple players). Jared wrote in mid-August about how he was not concerned about the lack of a deal at that time. I wrote at the end of August about internal caps and why I was not worried about Novozinsky’s five-year article. Jackson ended up writing in early September about why he thought a bridge deal might not be a bad idea. But at a certain point, patience turns to frustration, and the Devils seem to be crossing that line and risking the growth of their own core.
Plainly, if the Devils want Luke Hughes to take the next step in becoming a number one defenseman, missing the entirety of training camp and preseason for a second season in a row is not going to help. Last year, there was nothing that could be done about Luke’s absence. He was out with a left shoulder injury, which was eventually surgically repaired after he left Game One of Round One of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs against the Hurricanes. There are no such excuses now. Luke has gotten surgery and recovered well enough to play in camp right now. With only four preseason games, including tonight, it seems like we would be lucky to see Luke Hughes in the preseason at this point. If he does not sign in time, Hughes will not even have a chance to work with new defensive coach Brad Shaw before the regular season begins.
That is frustrating.
It is also frustrating to see anyone even half-seriously push the idea that Ethan Edwards can be thought of as a Hughes replacement. Yes, Keefe rightly praised Edwards recently, and he played very well against the Bridgeport Islanders on Tuesday. If Ethan Edwards was not a 23-year old fresh out of college in need of consistent playing time, I would be promoting him as the best left-handed seventh defenseman option available on the team. However, it is September and not April, and Edwards’ best place will be racking up minutes in Utica following the Devils’ last preseason game on October 4.
Superficially, Edwards shares some abilities with Hughes. They are both very good skaters. Edwards seems keen on pinching on offense, and he was rewarded with a goal against the Islanders. But I am not about to compare someone who topped out at 21 points at Michigan in his senior year to another defenseman who had 17 goals his freshman year of college, and 48 points the next season. Flash forward to today, and Luke Hughes has already had two productive NHL seasons. If Ethan Edwards has filled in for Luke Hughes even more than rarely by the end of the season, something will have gone seriously wrong. I have NHL hopes for Ethan Edwards, but don’t try to sell him as a Hughes replacement or stand-in.
Luke Hughes is one of the few players Devils fans are hinging the hopes of their next five or ten years on, along with his older brother, Jack, and Nico Hischier, Jesper Bratt, Timo Meier, Simon Nemec, and others. If the Devils want to win a Stanley Cup over this timeframe, they not only need to keep Luke Hughes, but they need him to be better than he has been in his first two seasons. Luke is not off to a bad start in the NHL by any means, but they need him to be a 60-point producing two-way force if they want to get to the promised land. At what point does playing hardball hurt the team more than paying a little more than what Tom Fitzgerald would like to pay Luke on a long-term deal?
If Luke comes back for the last three games of the preseason and gets into two exhibitions plus practices, I will say that all is well that ends well. But if Luke misses the preseason, I will be reaching unexpected amounts of frustration for a hockey season I have been greatly looking forward to. If this somehow stretches on long enough that Luke Hughes misses regular season games, my mostly-positive takes on the front office and their offseason will sour significantly.
Had the news on their negotiations indicated any progress over the last week, I might feel better about the state of things. We have heard that there is a big gap between the Hughes camp and Fitzgerald, and that has not changed. But I am not interested in hearing the explanations of why X and Y players’ contract outlooks might be holding back the sides from coming to an agreement. We cannot be seriously comparing an RFA in pre-arbitration years to veteran unrestricted free agents looking for their last big paydays. The rising cap affects all, yes, but more importantly, we are talking about how one of the most gifted athletes of all the defensemen in the NHL should be paid now, four years from now, and eight years from now. They are not fitting that cleanly under the cap without one of or a combination of long-term injured reserve, deferred salary, or a trade.
It has been up to Tom Fitzgerald to figure out how to make the money work for the last three months. It certainly could have and should have been done by now. Nothing has happened to significantly change the cap outlook of the team. Johnny Kovacevic will be out until the calendar year 2026. Maybe, he could be back by January or February, or maybe not. The Devils will have just a bit under $7 million in cap space when Seamus Casey is sent down for Luke Hughes. They would have even more if they were willing to waive Kurtis MacDermid. So, if the team wants to sign Hughes to a max deal of at least $72 million, they can shave the AAV down to $8.5 million with deferred salary (if they deferred about $17 million over the first four years), but they would still need to put Kovacevic on LTIR unless they wanted to defer over half of the total salary while running a bare-bones, no-extras roster. I am not sure they want to do that either, with Juho Lammikko signed and Luke Glendening looking like a good fit in camp.
If that all seems ridiculous, get this: Tom Fitzgerald has taken so long to sign Luke Hughes that it is now notably more difficult to save cap room by deferring salary than it was a month ago due to the decline in interest rates. Just waiting and “being patient” has dulled the tools Fitzgerald has had at his disposal.
Was I seriously expecting that the Devils would use deferred salary to their advantage? No, but it would have been nice to see them use the same tools that a division rival has used to get a leg up on everyone else. And it would have been very nice to see Luke Hughes suit up for training camp on time like the other guys on the Devils roster. Either way, Luke Hughes must be signed by the end of preseason, or the front office is putting the success of this season at risk. If the team is already going to have Kovacevic out until New Year’s or even later, they cannot afford to have Luke Hughes playing catch-up with Brad Shaw and on his pairings and special teams assignments for the first month of the season.
Your Thoughts
Do you think Luke Hughes will sign this weekend? How are you feeling about Hughes and Fitzgerald right now? How will you feel in a week if he’s still unsigned? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for reading.