Devils Post Mortem: Gritty Playoff Effort Masks Underwhelming Season
For all the lousy luck that went against the Devils this season, particularly the injury epidemic right up through Tuesday night’s heartbreaking 5-4 elimination defeat in the double overtime of Game 5 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals at Carolina, this team was pretty fortunate to advance this far.
New Jersey’s 42-33-7 regular season record would not have been adequate enough to qualify for the playoffs in every non-COVID year since the NHL went to the current wild card format save for last season, when the Devils would have squeezed in on a regulation wins tiebreaker.
The Devils clearly gave a gutsy effort with a depleted roster in the series and might have been able to bring it back to New Jersey for a Game 6 if not for some questionable calls. Of course, a team that finds it impossible to overcome those bouts of adversity with a penalty kill or a momentum-swinging shift typically doesn’t deserve to advance. New Jersey’s 3-0 lead after the first period was erased in just 5:40 of play in the middle frame.
By the first overtime, the Devils were running on fumes, as the Hurricanes outshot them, 19-4, after regulation before Sebastian Aho ended the series with a power play goal on the back side of a four-minute minor to Devils forward Dawson Mercer.
These Devils were a pretty average hockey team before and after All-Star center Jack Hughes went crashing into the end boards in Vegas on March 2, prematurely ending his season for the third time in the last four seasons. The team improved in many areas from the prior season’s debacle, from the net on out to the special teams, but it lost some of the dynamic juice that made them such a joy to watch only two years ago.
Against Carolina, it all came undone—injuries forced the team to enlist an eighth, ninth and tenth defenseman, their third-ranked power play took an 0-fer, and goalie Jacob Markstrom developed leaks at a couple of inopportune moments during the series. This might have been the No. 2 versus No. 3 matchup in the Metropolitan Division, but the divide between the two clubs only one seed apart appeared as vast as those between a Presidents’ Trophy winner versus a lottery team.
Some of the NaturalStatTrick.com metrics, like five-on-five expected goals for percentages, showed that the games were fairly evenly played. The actual five-on-five goal count was 10-9 in New Jersey’s favor. That may have been because Markstrom was Herculean, posting a .909 save percentage on those that were deemed high danger scoring chances.
The Devils had some non-Markstrom highlights in the series—and their Game 3 victory courtesy of embattled defenseman Simon Nemec’s double overtime goal was epic—but Carolina’s 1-through-20 was clearly superior. Until the Devils found some offense in Tuesday’s first period, they had gotten just two assists from other defensemen and absolutely zilch from their bottom six. Remember hearing how guys like Paul Cotter and Stefan Noesen were built for the postseason? Not in this odd year.
Noesen at least made his presence felt at the net front on New Jersey’s regular season power plays, where he scored 11 of his career-high 22 goals. Without that production, though, his impact was negligible. When he did break through this series with a net front deflection for New Jersey’s third goal, it was three seconds after a Devils power play expired.
Carolina’s scoring in the series was pretty top heavy as well, but their depth players like Logan Stankoven and Jordan Martinook were constant threats. And those lines helped wear down an exhausted Devils defense crew.
Even if they didn’t get scored on, the Cody Glass/Noesen/Cotter line got rolled to the tune of a 29% expected goals share and a 21-7 deficit in scoring chances, per NST. The Justin Dowling/Tomas Tatar/Nathan Bastian trio performed only slightly better in those metrics.
As I’ve been howling all season, this goes back to Tom Fitzgerald’s “hard to play against” obsession. The Devils General Manager was willing to sacrifice the team’s speed and skill advantages in favor of more grit and grind, an overcorrection, in my view, from New Jersey’s five-game defeat to the same Hurricanes in the 2023 Conference semifinals.
Where does Fitzgerald go to close the gap now? He might convince ownership that this disappointment was all an injury-related deviation from the team’s true capabilities and lobby to run it back as is, but hockey people should know otherwise. The Devils were on a 9-12-3 slide when Hughes went down, which isn’t an insignificant sample. That they then closed with a 9-10-1 stretch and still made the playoffs is an indictment of their Division competitors as much as a tribute to their resolve.
New Jersey dealt their first-round pick in the 2025 NHL Entry Draft to Calgary when they acquired Markstrom, so I would expect some trades of extraneous defensemen this summer to rebalance the roster. The prospect pool isn’t as deep as it used to be, especially up front, but Fitzgerald could dangle some prized past and future picks for immediate help.
The team isn’t in terrible shape salary cap-wise, with spotrac.com showing the Devils with about $14 million of room and only defenseman Luke Hughes’ pending restricted free agency to worry about this summer. However, they’re getting to the point where the onerous contracts, like Ondrej Palat ($6 million AAV for another two seasons) and Dougie Hamilton ($9 million for another three seasons) are becoming problematic. You’d also want more than 26 goals (and just two in the playoffs) for Timo Meier’s $8.8 million cap hit through 2031.
The bottom line, though: Given the relatively team-friendly deals of stars Jack Hughes, Nico Hischier, and Jesper Bratt that just accrued another year of service, there is no other way to look at this season than as a waste.
To rephrase an old dictum from baseball GM Branch Rickey, it doesn’t matter if the residue arose from bad luck, design, or both. The Devils didn’t get it done.