When I wrote the Devils’ November Month in Review, the Devils were in first place in the Metropolitan Division. They were in second place in the Eastern Conference. Since then, four games to start December, stringing a five-game losing streak along, has slipped the Devils to 10th in the Eastern Conference, now with more games played than most of the conference and without a points percentage (.569) that puts them on pace to make the playoffs.
The Devils have a lot of problems, as exposed on the ice by the recent injury suffered by Jack Hughes at a team dinner. But these failings run from top to bottom. The front office has made missteps and is habitually too slow to respond. Their organizational depth is weak. The coaching staff is not consistently putting the roster they do have in the best position to win. Some coaches have been getting particularly bad results in their area of expertise. If you were to run down every person’s job performance, they might not look their best this season, good standings start aside.
The truth is that the aforementioned Month in Review showed several deep flaws in the roster’s underlying performance. At five-on-five, the Devils ranked 26th in high-danger chance percentage. They ranked 20th in expected goals against. Their power play, despite a then-good process, had the 28th-ranked shooting percentage in the league. Their penalty kill, which started well, fell off a cliff in November with the 30th-ranked expected goals against and shots against rates in the league, saved only by their goaltenders and shorthanded offense by the Devils’ top forwards. In the Part One of this early December Devils alarm bell, we will dive into how the roster’s underperformance and lack of shooting skill has finally come back to bite the team.
Before we get into the deeper issues, including the coaches and some of their decision making and schemes, the actual roster’s performance needs addressing. Here’s a preview: the depth has been atrocious, and only a couple players are carrying their share of the load of late.
Tom Fitzgerald’s Roster is Failing
General Managers must be good at one thing above all: talent evaluation.
Jared recently went over Fitzgerald’s history of trades. While he has generally made good moves in this arena, he has had some particularly bad strings of moves. Right now, the Zacha for Haula and the subsequent Haula-for-nothing cap dump trades stick out like a sore thumb on this team. Having Cody Glass and Luke Glendening centering the bottom six is killing the team’s ability to run a competitive bottom six. Yes, Glass holds his own on the third line, with the Devils roughly playing even hockey at five-on-five. But Luke Glendening is incapable of being a center at his age in today’s NHL.
In 29 games, Glendening’s fourth lines have been outscored 11-3. For the most part, no combination of wingers have turned this line into something watchable, while several of the players tried on this line do vastly better up the lineup:
- Noesen with Glendening: 42.53 CF%, 1-4 GF-GA, 38.43 xGF%
- Noesen without Glendening: 53.82 CF%, 2-6 GF-GA, 51.97 xGF%
- Cotter with Glendening: 42.09 CF%, 1-8 GF-GA, 38.02 xGF%
- Cotter without Glendening: 44.63 CF%, 7-10 GF-GA, 39.30 xGF%
- Brown with Glendening: 31.43 CF%, 0-2 GF-GA, 30.65 xGF%
- Brown without Glendening: 48.91 CF%, 10-13 GF-GA, 41.45 xGF%
This is the incompatibility of a winger like Paul Cotter with a center like Luke Glendening. In the modern NHL, centers are reputed for their defensive ability but really derive most of their real value by driving offense. It is difficult to drive offense from the center position, and a subpar offensive center can quickly hold his line back. On the other hand, wingers can make lines fall apart with poor defensive play, even if they are offensively gifted. Having Luke Glendening, who can’t play offense, with Paul Cotter, who can’t play defense, is a recipe for disaster. At least with Noesen playing up the lineup, you can look to the team’s 2.63 shooting percentage in those 136 minutes for a reason things aren’t going well. But more on that later…
Erik Haula has 16 points in 28 games this season with a 53.2 faceoff win percentage out of over 300 draws, playing over 16 minutes a night. Pavel Zacha has 21 points in 29 games with a 51.9 faceoff win percentage in over 300 draws, playing over 17 minutes a night. Having either of those guys on the third line over the past several weeks could be the difference between a five-game losing streak like this one and a mildly unpleasant treading stretch. But this team isn’t even treading water.
This is not me saying that I do not think Luke Glendening provides nothing to the team. He is a good penalty killer. But he can, in fact, play that role from a less offensively important position. Shutdown fourth line wingers might not get on the scoresheet often, but they won’t hold their linemates back from scoring in the way Glendening seems to be this season from the center position. He does not get into the dirty areas to score often enough, he is not playing fast enough to get an occasional rush chance, and he is not winning enough on the boards to create chances for teammates.
The problem then really worsens when considering who else Fitzgerald signed this year. Juho Lammikko, who had not been in the NHL since the 2021-22 season, has been redundant. He is an offensively unskilled fourth line shutdown center. Lammikko, like Glendening, has seen the Devils score under 30% of the total goals in his ice time. All season, there has only been one time where Lammikko has looked good: when he is centering Stefan Noesen, without Glendening on the ice. In those limited minutes, the Devils outshot opponents 14-2, but Lammikko has been too unskilled to finish his chances, while not being a playmaker for his wings. Lammikko might have more in the tank as a fourth line center than Glendening, but they cannot be on the ice together. The redundancy worsens their combined defensive skills while gaining no offense in the process.
A GM who is following these trends might see that, while he needs depth scoring, he has unnecessarily doubled up the fourth line penalty killing winger who might be able to play center sometimes role. It might be cutthroat, but one of Glendening or Lammikko should be waived by the New Jersey Devils. But it does not end there.
Ondrej Palat, like Stefan Noesen, has played better hockey than his scoresheet production has indicated. I am not going to rip Palat on a “he can’t play hockey!” kind of tangent. He can, he plays well, but his hands seem to be what we call cooked. Maybe if he made the sort of move he made last night to set up Cody Glass in front of the net for Jack Hughes when the latter center was healthy, he might have a few more assists. But five points in 29 games is unacceptable for a man commanding a $6 million cap hit. At that price range, the Devils need goals:
Since Jack Hughes got hurt, the Devils have scored 25 all-situations goals. Nico Hischier (7) and Timo Meier (6) account for over half. The rest of the team has combined for 12 goals, with nine players being held without a goal in significant minutes.
Remember Dawson Mercer’s hot start to the season? Since going back to the second-line center role, he has one goal and four assists. That is unacceptable, as he is falling back to being the kind of player he was the last couple of seasons. Is he a little unlucky? Sure. Can the Devils take unlucky right now? No. On the wing, Connor Brown returned suddenly from an injury that appeared to be lingering, with the Devils pushing his timeline back until he magically recovered when Jack Hughes sliced his pinky on glass. Since returning, he has one goal and two assists. He had five goals and two assists in the 11 games he played before getting hurt, and he has not shown the same sort of speed with a nose for rush chances since returning.
In early May, I wrote an article titled, “The Curious Case of Paul Cotter: How Sheldon Keefe Can Unlock His Skill in 2025-26.” In this article, I wrote about how lines that featured Paul Cotter seemed to habitually fall apart on defense, while Cotter only managed one singular assist in his final 60 games played last season. Despite being an obviously talented goal scorer, I argued that Keefe needed to figure Cotter out if he wanted to be a productive NHLer. This has not happened. Paul Cotter still makes more extra hits than sound defensive plays. Paul Cotter is still not a passable playmaker. But worst of all: Paul Cotter is not scoring. Last season, Cotter had 16 goals on 12.11 individual expected goals. This season, that has fallen to two goals on 3.63 ixG, marking a decline from 0.7 ixG/60 minutes to 0.61/60 with his decline in conversion rate. As a result, the Devils have been outscored 18-8 (30.77 GF%) with Cotter on the ice at five-on-five this season, down from being outscored 43-27 (38.57 GF%). Cotter and the Devils are doing this with an xGF% of 38.75, down from his on-ice mark of 48.71 last season.
With none of the scoring forwards performing that integral aspect of their jobs, the pressure falls to the offensive defensemen in Luke Hughes, Dougie Hamilton, and Simon Nemec to pick up the slack. But they have not, either. Dougie Hamilton, like Connor Brown, returned suddenly from an injury that kept him out for a string of games once Jack Hughes got hurt. Since then, he has one point in 11 games. Is Hamilton starting to look better? By my eye, he is starting to get into better scoring areas with the puck, but he is still goalless on 30 shots and 66 attempts in these 11 games. For a guy who was on a 20-goal pace before getting injured, who showed that ability between 2022-23 and when he got hurt the following season, this dry spell has cost the team points in the standings.
Luke Hughes has had a much different output following his brother’s injury this season in comparison to what he did in March and April. After Jack hurt his shoulder against Vegas, Luke had 18 points in 18 games, driving the power play to perfection with 10 power play points. This time around, Luke has six points in 12 games, including just two power play points. Of course, Luke has not been favored on the first power play this season, though that may need to change now that Dougie is pointless on the power play in far more playing time (24:00 to Luke’s 14:51) since Jack’s injury.
And despite claims that Simon Nemec would be better than Luke Hughes on the power play, Nemec is also pointless in 24:18 of power play ice time. Nemec’s three points since Jack’s injury is a massive blow to the team’s offense after the young defenseman had 10 points in the 12 prior games. Is some of this due to the constantly-shuffling pairings? Maybe. But all of these defensemen seeing their production slip after Jack Hughes’s injury is only exacerbating the lack of shooting skill among the forwards.
Who Should Stay, Who Should Go?
More drastic fan responses might include wanting Fitzgerald to trade a member of the team’s apparent “core,” which includes Nico Hischier, Timo Meier, Jesper Bratt, Luke Hughes, and Dougie Hamilton alongside the injured Jack Hughes. Nico Hischier, as the team Captain, might attract more negative attention from some corners of the fanbase. But as mentioned earlier, Nico Hischier and Timo Meier are pretty much the top two players preventing the Devils from having gone 0-12-0 in the 12 games since Jack’s injury.
On the other hand, some may turn their ire to Jesper Bratt, whose shot has been ice cold this season. I get it, and I am frustrated with that, but Bratt is the only player aside from Hsichier to have double-digit points since Hughes’s injury. It’s no accident: Bratt is a far superior passer to just about everyone else on the team. If he were removed from the roster, I genuinely worry that the Devils’ rush offense would go from dry to nonexistent, while the team would have trouble even gaining the offensive zone from the defensive and neutral zones. From HockeyViz, just look at how much Bratt impacts the team’s offense compared to league average shot rates.
And then without:
Rather than trading away the three forward play drivers the team has left (or Arseny Gritsyuk, who is quickly heading in that direction), the front office needs to think hard about the makeup of the rest of the roster. If the Devils want to make an add, they are going to need to move not only big salaries, but unproductive ones. By moving one of Hischier, Meier, or Bratt, Fitzgerald would just be taking an under-skilled lineup and making it even worse.
Teams that go far in the playoffs have great second and third lines. The most unproductive players there, especially at the highest salaries, are the ones who need to either improve or be replaced. Beyond those lines, having just an average fourth line would be a massive improvement for the Devils. Tom Fitzgerald needs to figure it out, because it does not seem that Sheldon Keefe has implemented a system that keeps the Devils dangerous regardless of who is in the lineup. We know that the players Tom Fitzgerald has assembled in the NHL have been too unproductive beyond the big four: diving into that has been the purpose of this Part One. In Part Two, we will talk about the problems among the coaching staff, including their usage decisions (especially regarding Dennis Cholowski, even strength lines, and special teams deployment) and their schemes, which have led to offensive ineptitude and regularly blown defensive coverages, in addition to goaltending that is not meeting the moment. Beyond the coaches, we will talk about the organizational depth left by drafting, trades, and Utica Comets GM Dan MacKinnon, who has not given the Devils many internal options to turn to.
Your Thoughts
What have you thought about the entirety of the Devils’ NHL roster? Do you think anyone is actually playing better than their production suggests? Do you think anyone will turn it around soon? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for reading.