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I think if you ask anyone who regularly follows the New Jersey Devils about the team’s prospects heading into the 2024-25 season, they’ll agree that they made improvements in several key areas this offseason. But if there’s one area they’d like to see the team add another player, it’s probably adding another forward to the middle six.
That’s not to say the Devils haven’t already made additions in that area. They are joined by Stefan Noesen On the first day of free agency, They reunited with Thomas Tatar After the first wave of free agency has passed. But I do think both players are viewed as third-line wingers, and some have reservations about whether the Devils forwards are good enough now that the top-heavy portion of their roster has passed.
Part of the reason is that Ondrej Palat is simply…I think it’s OK….the first two years of his five-year contract. Part of the reason for this is that the Devils admitted defeat on the Alexander Holtz draft pick. Send him to Paul Cote in Las VegasHe’s more of a bottom-six forward than your ideal player higher up in the lineup.
The Devils paid Palat to be a top-six forward. They drafted Holtz to be a top-six forward. Neither worked out, and one of them is no longer with the team now. As much as I like Palat, I admit that he hasn’t quite hit $6 million per year in the first two years of his contract. We can argue all day about whether the Devils gave Holtz a fair chance, but the player also has a share of the blame for not earning the trust of the coaching staff and front office. Regardless, the Devils wasted a valuable asset with the No. 7 pick on a player who is no longer a member of the team four years later, which is far from ideal by picking so high in the draft in the first place.
Chris wrote last week Should the Devils join the PTO race? For some experienced free agent forward. I looked into whether the Devils should also add a forward It wasn’t long after the dust settled on free agency. The reality is that there isn’t a lot of potential on the market, and while I respect the careers of veterans like Max Pacioretty and James van Riemdyk, I really don’t see what they can bring to the table right now.
I’m not trying to discredit Chris’ suggestion that the Devils consider taking the PTO route and continue to tinker with the roster. That’s not the case, because I’m guessing these are indeed conversations the Devils had internally with these players at some point. An NHL GM’s job is never done, even if much of it is. I’m just saying Lee Stempniak PTO Success Story It’s rare that a PTO actually works out. There are exceptions, sure… there are always exceptions, but generally speaking, most PTOs don’t work out. Most players who sign a PTO do so as a last resort to stay in the league. On the one hand, that’s great because you don’t have to question someone’s efforts to try to keep their spot in the league. On the other hand, we’re talking about players who have pretty much hit the end of the road, at least in terms of being quality NHL players.
There are still players available on the market for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don’t skate well. Maybe they are too one-dimensional and are “attack first, attack only” scoring winger. Maybe the opposite is true and they haven’t shown the ability to score consistently at the NHL level. Maybe they are too old or injured, or they “don’t perform well on the field”, or they are no longer NHL-level players.
I don’t think the Devils need bad skaters or “attack first, attack only” type players anymore. If they did, they probably would have kept Alexander Holtz instead of trading him. The fact that the Devils waived him when they were close to the cap for the third straight season with a year left in his ELC should tell you if they want or need these types of players when the goal is now to win hockey games. I’m not trying to bury Holtz, but waiving him just to turn around and sign a player like Filip Zadina, Kevin Labanc, or Mike Hoffman doesn’t make a lot of sense on the surface. These players aren’t good enough to play for the worst team in the league in San Jose anymore, but am I supposed to believe they are the missing link the Devils need?
The Devils are at a point on their timeline where they should stop experimenting and testing players. They don’t need schemes or what’s possible if x, y, and z all go right, but players who can play a specific role and do it well. If you’re a scoring winger, you need to be able to score. If you’re a high-energy player who struggles against the bottom six, you need to be able to do that effectively. If you’re big, you need to play like a big man instead of shrinking in the corner. They don’t need players with glaring flaws in their game, like a lack of skating ability, a poor 200-foot game, a waning scoring touch, or a lack of willingness to be physical. At this stage of the offseason, the UFA market is flooded with those types of players.
Obviously, a lot of what I’m about to write is dependent on a variety of factors, but if the Devils want to further expand this roster, the smartest thing to do would be to see how the team performs over 50, 55, 60 games, evaluate the roster at that time, see if any moves are forced due to injuries, and then make additions at the trade deadline.
We don’t know what Dawson Mercer’s next deal will look like, but it will directly impact remaining cap space and how much the Devils are able to accumulate during the 2024-25 season. Explaining how capital accumulation works is a bit complicatedbut the simplest way to look at it is this. The more cap space the Devils have entering the season, the more cap space they can accumulate throughout the season. The more cap space they accumulate, the more cap space they have at the trade deadline to go out and make potential additions before the deadline. As long as the Devils don’t use LTIR to go over the cap, they should accumulate space under the cap. There are ways to manipulate things to accumulate more cap space, such as sending eligible players to the AHL on paper trades on off-days (Or whatever the Rangers did two years ago to make enough space for Patrick Kane), but as long as they don’t spend every penny they have until they hit the salary cap, they should have room to make modest additions before the deadline, and perhaps a few modest additions if they want to get creative (let other teams keep salary, trade any players deemed expendable, etc.).
It may be too early to tell which players are pending UFAs and which ones might be available at the trade deadline, but I think we have a good idea of which teams will be good and which ones won’t. That means we have a good idea of which players might be available via trade.
Obviously, the Devils have to do their part and perform well enough to contend and warrant reinforcements at the trade deadline. But this team has proven they can do it, because they did it two years ago. That Devils team had several veteran wingers, skepticism about their middle six of Tomas Tatar and Andreas Johansson, and unproven young players like Jesper Boqvist, Fabian Zetterlund, and Alex Holtz. What happened in the end? Johansson failed to make the team in training camp and was exiled to Utica, where he remained until he was traded along with Zetterlund in the Timo Meier deal. Although the BMW line is still very much there, Good or Badbut that didn’t stop Fitzgerald from going out and recruiting Curtis Lazar.
We don’t know exactly what this Devils team needs because we haven’t seen the 2024-25 season. That being said, we do know what they might need. If they need a winger who can score six points in the middle, perhaps that guy could be Frank Vatrano (although I prefer a bigger body and a heavier play style to go with the scoring). If they need a center because the Curtis Lazar experiment didn’t work out or they want to use Eric Haula as a winger again, maybe that guy is Nick Bjugstad. If the idea is that they need a more competitive, energetic, big player who can play a lot of different roles, there’s no shortage of those types of players available as rental options, from Brandon Tanev to Yanni Gould to Jordan Greenway. That’s just to name a few potential options, but they’re all better than the current players who will be on the open market a few weeks into training camp. If Tom Fitzgerald sticks with his past practice of targeting players with some control via trades, as he has done previously with Timo Meier, Curtis Lazar, Jake Allen, Jacob Markstrom and others…it will expand the pool of candidates.
I don’t expect Fitzgerald to trade for another potential centerpiece like he did with the Meyer trade two seasons ago. That was an opportunity to bring in a perennial All-Star top-six scoring winger who was in his 20s and had size, something the Devils lacked, and I don’t think Fitzgerald will regret doing. However, the Devils’ top-six is now largely set, and they used their flexibility this summer to add experience to the back end. The Devils may be done with big-money signings, but that doesn’t mean they’re done with them. I do expect this team to make the playoffs, and I do expect them to make any additions at that time once they have a clear idea of what they need.
I can understand the idea that an NHL general manager’s job is never done and that they should always be looking to improve. I can also understand the idea that there is little downside to having someone on a PTO basis. After all, you don’t have to actually sign the player. Even if you do and things don’t work out, we’re talking about a one-year contract, likely at the league minimum salary, that will likely be traded for a bag of pucks or buried if it doesn’t work out 30 games into the season.
If there were players worth signing on the open market, they likely would have been signed weeks ago. I don’t think the Devils need to wonder if 35-year-old Max Pacioretty has any potential left in him now that they signed Tomas Tatar this summer. While there’s no harm in extending the PTO, it’s unlikely that any of the candidates this year will move things forward in a positive way, and there’s a good chance they’ll end up doing more harm than good. The Devils better believe they’ve done enough this summer to get the team back on track. Then, if they need to make any adjustments, it’s after a decent sample size of games and a better pool of players to choose from to see what the situation is with this team. The Devils need to do their part to make sure it’s worth it for Fitzgerald to buy into the team before the deadline, and I think they will indeed do that.
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