Devils Go Dark At Deadline
On Friday afternoon, Devils General Manager Tom Fitzgerald proclaimed that he is no Dead Man Walking, according to his interview with media members following an inactive NHL Trade Deadline day.
Who knows, since a decision on his future employment, one way or another, won’t be made until the offseason.
What’s set in stone is this team’s roster through season’s end, a configuration that is 13th in the Eastern Conference and nine points behind Boston, which has a game in hand, for the final Wild Card slot. The Devils (31-29-2), for all intents and purposes, will be playing out the string for 20 more games.
Notes from the press conference indicated why certain players, like defenseman Dougie Hamilton, weren’t moved, but I never heard a coherent response as to why. Other deals around the league sent high Draft picks, including a few 1s, this way and that. Fitzgerald really had no interest in snaring a few?
I guess doing nothing was better than going through with rumored additions, like the Devils’ alleged interest in former Vancouver forward Conor Garland, who instead ended up in Columbus. Whoever is running New Jersey’s front office this summer will be pinching pennies, with a projected $12.175 million in salary cap space for 2026-27, according to puckpedia.com, and needing to extend young players Arseny Gritsyuk and Simon Nemec. Garland would have cost the Devils $6 million against the cap for the next six seasons, quite a hit for a player with 7 goals and 19 assists in 50 games this season.
Curiously, Nemec’s name was bandied about by a few NHL pundits as one on whom Fitzgerald was considering offers. A pending restricted free agent, the Devils’ No. 2 overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft reportedly changed agents on Friday, which some have seen as a sign he wants out of an organization that he has felt disrespected by through AHL demotions and NHL benchings since his professional signing.
The word on the street was that Fitzgerald would only pull the trigger on a “hockey trade”, one that would generate a return of a proven top-6 forward. I couldn’t gauge from Fitzgerald’s comments if Nemec will be going anywhere this summer (I hesitate to interpret his eye shifts when asked as suggestive of anything), but if he isn’t traded, I’d advise you to get in if there’s any action on him holding out through the preseason.
Fitzgerald possibly was looking at Brett Pesce’s “week-to-week” lower body injury diagnosis as an excuse to hold onto all four of his righthanded defensemen. Except that would have been short-sighted reasoning. The remaining games are meaningless.
I get that all but Nemec have no trade clauses in their contracts—the fact that no NHL team has more players with such restrictions is on Fitzgerald too—but I can’t believe that anyone would pass on the opportunity to play for a Stanley Cup if such a new club was offered as a destination. Fitzgerald mentioned that he will try to shake one loose in the offseason, but I don’t see what will be different from a player’s perspective then from now.
You can probably take Fitzgerald’s word that he believed in this core too much to go into strict “sell” mode in what was characterized as a seller’s market, even at many levels below blowing it all up. Devils fans, though, do not believe in Fitzgerald’s acumen to get it on the right track after what will be a fourth season out of the playoffs in his six on the job.