Devils Bypass Opportunity To Complete Reset
It has been a mere month since Sunny Mehta was introduced as the Devils’ new General Manager, so he certainly deserves some slack in putting his vision for the franchise into action.
Mehta’s first move of note came on Monday when the team announced that Goaltending Coach Dave Rogalski was relieved of his duties and that they will be reassigning Assistant Coach Sergei Brylin within the organization. Rogalski was an easy target given the constant struggles in the Devils’ net since he arrived in 2020.
But it’s what that press release did not include that elicited head scratching—per multiple reports, Head Coach Sheldon Keefe and the rest of his staff will be returning to their roles for the 2026-27 season. The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun posted that Mehta “had evaluated the HC position and has decided to bring Keefe (who has two years remaining on his contract) back.”
From my perspective, that decision represented a missed opportunity for Mehta to come in with a clean slate. The Devils have clearly underachieved in Keefe’s two seasons, getting bounced by Carolina in five games the first round and then missing the playoffs altogether this past season.
In both instances, New Jersey suffered mid-season blues that altered its trajectory. Injuries, particularly to star center Jack Hughes, were always a convenient excuse. Except it’s a HC’s job to adjust; Keefe typically had no answers.
To be clear, it’s not apparent that Keefe suddenly forgot how to coach—this was his first season on his seven-year HC record, which included three consecutive 100-point campaigns in Toronto, that didn’t extend into the playoffs. It’s just that I question whether he can capably run this team.
Considering the Devils’ salary cap issues—not to mention all the no trade/no move clauses in the vast majority of the contracts—and the relatively barren impending free agent market, a full-blown roster reconstruction for next season seems remote. That means Keefe will be piloting pretty much the same engine that too often tuned him out. Not many teams in this era lose a game 9-0 like the Devils did on Long Island in January.
The Devils have the high-end talent to compete for the Stanley Cup; they’ve just lacked consistency since their franchise record setting 2022-23 season. The same bugaboos—puck management, defensive zone coverage, etc.—continually set this team back even when they’re skating well. It was almost like they were ingrained against simply dumping pucks out, instead risking breakout passes against pressure. That Hughes seemed to get the message during his glorious Olympic run that his penchant for turning pucks over in the worst spots wouldn’t fly only to have Keefe let it slide wasn’t a good look for Keefe’s New Jersey prospects.
It’s true that the Devils appeared to be shook when Hughes suffered a fluke hand injury at a November team dinner. But it’s also true that they went 34-24-3 with Hughes in the lineup this season. That .582 points percentage would have still had New Jersey on the outside looking in on the playoff picture.
Keefe, to his credit, really didn’t blame external forces for the failures, but that isn’t the point. His preaching on playing the right way too often fell on deaf ears. Sometimes, a team just needs a different voice.
Perhaps Meha looked out at the available HC candidate landscape and wasn’t impressed. Bruce Cassidy, a Stanley Cup-winning HC who was let go by Vegas with eight games remaining in the regular season, has been denied permission to interview elsewhere; the rest of the pool contains retreads and first-timers. Mehta might be thinking that he doesn’t want to botch such a monumental decision so early in his tenure, so let’s run it back one more season.
That’s the kind of logic that got this franchise in trouble in the first place. Fortunately for the analytics wizard Mehta, he will get a mulligan if he miscalculated.
Rinse and repeat the same mistakes over and over again with this ownership group. Reminiscent of when Keefe was hired but he retained almost all of the assistants from the Ruff / Greene staff. Keefe said it was his decision and his decision alone. A year later, most of the retained assistants were gone after a wasted season.
Are they making Mehta say the same thing now, that it's his decision and his decision alone to retain Keefe? It's not going to matter much how smart Mehta is or how much better he might be than Fitzgerald if Mehta isn't empowered to make culture changing decisions. With the retention of Keefe, it looks like the team will continue with too many cooks in the front office and no real chef leading the way.
It's a corporate business approach relying on Board Room management and owners and board room members getting their preferred guys to lead certain functions. That approach hasn't worked on the ice in NJ for the past 12 to 13 years under this ownership group.
Keefe has already had 2 seasons to improve the culture. I am not encouraged by reading about how Jack Hughes kept grilling Sunny Mehta about how to play poker in their introductory meeting. I can't imagine any world where someone like Lou Lamoriello would indulge one of his young hockey players, especially a defensively deficient one, on a conversation about card games.