Sheldon Keefe has two things to prove this year

another day, Jared wrote an article About How New Jersey Devils This season is an absolute must to make the playoffs, plain and simple. He’s right: after all the promises of a better tomorrow and all the moves made by Tom Fitzgerald, this team is now in win mode. Today, I want to talk about this topic with new head coach Sheldon Keefe. How is he getting into this mood?

Normally, first-year head coaches of new teams are given a buffer in this regard. Some fans might even be more forgiving than that, but even the most critical fans usually give a coach a year before bringing him in. But with this Devils team and everything else going on, Keefe is put in a very sticky spot right out of the gate. I don’t want to say that if the Devils miss the playoffs this season, he’s going to be fired after one season and we no longer have Lou Lamoriello coaching the team. But if the team doesn’t play 82 games, he’s certainly going to be under a lot of pressure.

In fact, I think Keefe has two things to prove this season as the new Devils head coach. He needs to prove he can replicate the regular season success he had in Toronto, and he also needs to break the playoff curse he seemed to have brought upon himself while coaching Toronto. Let’s take a look at both of those.

1. He needs to replicate his regular season success

The biggest highlight of Keefe’s hiring was how successful he was as Toronto’s head coach in the regular season. In 349 games with the team, he compiled a 212-97-40 record. That’s pretty awesome. In his 5 seasons with the team, his season scoring percentage never dropped below .622, and that season, the Maple Leafs still finished with 102 points. So in his worst regular season, in terms of scoring percentage, his team finished with over 100 points. You couldn’t ask for a better regular season record from a head coach. By comparison, the Devils have only had one season since 2012 where they scored over 100 points, and that was the very good 2022-23 season, where they finished with 112 points, one more than the 111 points Toronto earned that year under Keefe.

Now, Keefe needs to prove that at least part of the success is due to him and his system, rather than the star players in Toronto. He needs to replicate his winning ways, playing Jack Hughes, Nico Hischier, Jesper Bratt, and Timo Maier in place of Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares, and Mitch Marner. If he can do that, and if the Devils score around 100 points or more this year, it would show that Sheldon Keefe’s hockey system has made some progress and that the Devils have found a good system. However, if the Devils miss the playoffs again this season, especially if they score less than 90 points, it would show that he may have been a bad hire and that his success in Toronto was based on the talent there, rather than his coaching style or the system he installed. He can’t afford that, especially with expectations already high for this team.

2. He needs to win the playoffs

Keefe’s biggest failure, and the reason Toronto fired him, was his inability to translate regular season success into playoff success. Under him, Toronto has lost four of the five times in a first-round playoff series. The Maple Leafs lost Game 7 of the first round in 2021, 2022 and 2024, and they lost Game 5 of the first round in the Covid bubble. It was heartbreaking. It wasn’t like his teams were swept or lost quickly. Each time, Toronto made it to the decisive game, the tiebreaker, and lost. His only success came in 2023, when Toronto finally won a playoff series by beating Tampa in 6 games before being defeated by Florida in 5 games.

That kind of playoff loss would obviously be unacceptable in Toronto, and that’s why he was fired. But the Devils gave him a chance to prove he can win under pressure. And he needs to prove it in Newark. Devils fans know what kind of roster we have, the talent of the core players, and what they are capable of. They showed it by reaching the second round in the 2022-23 season, and now Keefe needs to get to the second round and beyond regularly. Regardless of what happens after that, fans will be happy with a playoff berth this year, but beyond that, he won’t have much room to play here for long. He needs playoff wins, playoff series wins, and he needs it soon.

If he can do both of these things well, with regular season success this year and even playoff success this year, he will be able to lead this team to Stanley CupBut Devils fans also remember the late 2000s when the Devils made the playoffs year after year but never accomplished anything there. That won’t last long, just like it did in Toronto. Keefe knows that. This year focus on the regular season, focus on getting this team on track, and then do what you have to do to win a playoff series and compete for a Cup.