Kovacevic will miss a portion of the upcoming season as he recovers from knee surgery. Could he be an LTIR candidate to help the Devils become cap compliant?
There have been a lot of questions as to how the New Jersey Devils would become cap compliant if they were to sign Luke Hughes to a lucrative long-term contract.
The Devils currently sit at $6,906,667 under the salary cap ceiling with Hughes left to sign, according to PuckPedia. And while that number might fluctuate a little bit depending upon how the Devils decide to configure the back end of their roster, it would appear that that number would be a bit short of what I would expect a Luke Hughes long-term deal to come in at regardless of how one configures the roster.
Dougie Hamilton’s name has reportedly been “out there” in terms of trade rumors. Ondrej Palat’s name has not, at least publicly. Neither player is easy to move at this moment for a variety of reasons. All of this raises the question of what the Devils might do to become cap compliant if they indeed sign Luke Hughes to the type of deal that I would expect an up-and-coming franchise cornerstone defenseman to get.
One option that hasn’t been discussed all that much pertains to the usage of LTIR to become cap compliant. And it just so happens that the Devils have a candidate who could feasibly start the upcoming season on LTIR in Johnathan Kovacevic.
Likely by design, the Devils have kept the specifics on Kovacevic’s injury vague publicly, but what we do know is that he left Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinal series vs. the Carolina Hurricanes early. Kovacevic was injured on the first shift of the game, wound up playing six minutes in totality, and was shut down at the first intermission when it was clear that he had suffered a significant injury. This took place on April 25th, 2025. He didn’t suit up again the rest of the series and would ultimately undergo knee surgery shortly after the Devils season came to an end a few days later.
Kovacevic said at breakup day that he will “be out for a decent amount of time and doesn’t anticipate he’ll be ready for the start of next year either”. He also said several times during his session that he “wants to do this thing right” in regards to his rehabilitation, not cut corners, and he’d have to wait a few weeks for swelling to go down before operating. Otherwise he would be at risk of suffering further damage to his injured knee. Tom Fitzgerald reaffirmed all of this when he said on July 2 that “he (Kovacevic) definitely won’t start the season but he’s doing great.”
Obviously, the team knows the full extent of the damage Kovacevic suffered to his knee, and we don’t. So it would be reckless of me to speculate on the severity of said injury.
What we do know is the most severe knee ligament injuries have lengthy timetables when it comes to recovery time. We also know that just because a professional athlete returns to play from this type of injury doesn’t necessarily mean that their level of performance is back to what it was pre-injury. Sometimes, players need extra time.
The Devils immediately being dismissive in regards to Kovacevic being able to start the season suggests this is a more severe injury, and it makes sense that they want to be protective of a player that they contractually committed to for five years earlier this year. Rushing Kovacevic back from a major knee injury doesn’t do anybody any good. And while I want to be clear that the team has not given a definitive timeline in regards to Kovacevic’s recovery time, I do think it should be pointed out how long these recoveries typically take. If Kovacevic were to miss 9-10 months from the date of his injury, that would put him on track to maybe return sometime around the Olympic break at the earliest and around the 2026 trade deadline on the longer side of that timetable.
According to PuckPedia’s GM mode, if the Devils signed Hughes to an 8x$8.6M deal and called up Arseni Gritsyuk to the active roster, they would be $2,618,333 over the salary cap ceiling. But if they put Kovacevic on LTIR, they would be cap compliant with $1,381,667 in available additional space with a full 23-man roster.
Of course, there are pros and cons to dipping into LTIR in the first place. Teams that utilize LTIR aren’t accruing cap space towards the trade deadline, which I’m sure is something the Devils would prefer to do as this is what they have done the last few seasons. The Devils would also run into a potential conundrum if/when Kovacevic is ready to go if he’s back on the earlier side of that timeline. Sure, the problem might ‘solve itself’ if another player suffers an injury and needs to go on LTIR himself, and there’s a decent chance between how physical the sport of hockey is and the Devils recent injury history that they could swap out Kovacevic for Player X at that time. But I don’t think that’s something that one would necessarily want to a) root for and b) plan for going into the season.
Teams have abused LTIR for years in order to ice rosters in the postseason that well-exceeded the salary cap. I’m not going to say that the players from those teams who were on LTIR didn’t suffer major injuries to land there in the first place. But I do know that the way the rules were set up, teams have been incentivized to not rush players back before Game 1 of the playoffs. Why would you when under the old system, the salary cap essentially vanishes once the postseason begins? It was a mockery of the system to where things had gotten to the point where the NHL not only felt the need to investigate certain circumstances to make sure everything was on the up and up, but they changed the LTIR rules in the new CBA that was just agreed to. Those new rules, however, do not apply to this upcoming season as this is the final season under the old agreement.
I’m not suggesting the Devils should try to methodically drag this process out, especially at a time when the league is trying to crack down on any improprieties. The Devils won’t want to be accused of any wrongdoing if they were to slow-play Kovacevic’s rehabilitation. I’m simply saying that not all injury rehabs are created equally, and the simplest way for the Devils to handle the situation in the interim if they can’t do a cap dump trade is to kick the can down the road and revisit the issue later on.
It remains to be seen how the Devils will figure out how to get Hughes under contract and move the rest of the pieces around the chess board to remain cap compliant. I would believe that Kovacevic going on LTIR for a sizable chunk of the upcoming campaign is a last resort option. But I do think its an option. And the longer that players such as Dougie Hamilton, Ondrej Palat, and Dawson Mercer remain on the roster, the more realistic it is that the Devils go down that path.