With Hughes Injury, Devils GM Could Get Undeserved Mulligan
Tuesday’s night’s devastating 4-3 loss in Dallas where the Devils surrendered the game-winner with 4.8 seconds remaining in regulation didn’t seal their fate. There’s still almost a quarter of the season left to play.
But the team’s announcement on Wednesday that star center Jack Hughes, who was injured during the previous game in Vegas, underwent season-ending shoulder surgery did.
And if the injury does indeed result in the Devils choking away their current playoff seed, it might end up saving Tom Fitzgerald’s job, even if it shouldn’t.
For New Jersey’s General Manager should no longer be feeling the pressure to buttress his struggling club by Friday’s Trade Deadline. In fact, it would now be malpractice for Fitzgerald to expend valuable assets on the better available players, particularly rentals, for such a long shot.
With so many teams close to the Wild Card, finding sellers, not to mention meeting their price points, has been difficult. The Lightning just dealt TWO first-round picks (top 10 protected) and a second-rounder to Seattle plus a fourth-round pick to Detroit for middle-six forwards Yanni Gourde and Oliver Bjorkstrand and a fifth-round pick.
That’s a team that is going for the Stanley Cup.
The Devils, on the other hand, are always content to wait til next year. The franchise is in peril of missing the playoffs for the 11th time in the last 13 seasons, including four in the five seasons following Fitzgerald’s promotion to the Big Chair in 2020.
Hughes’ injury just gave Fitzgerald a built-in excuse. Never mind that the Devils were skating in proverbial mud since the Holidays, in a 9-12-3 slump when Hughes tumbled into the end boards at the tail end of the Vegas loss. What was once a commanding lead over their Wild Card challengers has now dwindled to a mere six points with their closest competitors for the final seed holding multiple games in hand. With 19 games remaining, New Jersey was on track to blowing their entire wad even with Hughes in tow.
Fitzgerald, meanwhile, refused to pull the trigger on any deals that could have boosted the piddling production from the team’s bottom-six trios. Somehow the Rangers got an All-Star center in J.T. Miller from Vancouver for a good young player and a first-round pick. When many pundits had their obituaries all but posted, New York has gone 7-4 since the trade and vaulted back into the thick of the playoff race.
Not that the Devils could have specifically afforded Miller, who has four more seasons at an $8 million AAV on his contract, but it showed the difference in the two franchise’s aggressiveness. So what if the Timo Meier trade in 2023 hasn’t panned out as well for the Devils as people expected; arming up is what teams do to prepare for a long playoff run.
You could argue that it would be more prudent if Fitzgerald turned seller in the next two days. That’s his hit zone anyway. Maybe some team could use cheap pending free agent defenseman Jonathan Kovacevic and offer up a fourth-round pick or so. Given how well Nico Daws played in net when starter Jacob Markstrom was out, Jake Allen could also be on the block (Note: I’m not sure what would happen to the conditional pick the Devils sent to Montreal last year should Allen reach 40 games, but since he’s only at 23, I’d say it’s unlikely he gets there).
To me, though, the biggest undeserved mulligan Fitzgerald could get won’t be from any inactivity, but from the underlying roster construction at the outset. I’ve been warning you all season about the dangers of the team being so reliant on a couple of stars to provide all the offense.
But make no mistake, this is HIS vision. He reinforces it at every press conference when he makes the No. 1 priority being “hard to play against.”
I’ll die on the hill that Fitzgerald took the wrong lesson from the Devils’ second-round loss to Carolina in the 2023 postseason. Between injuries and bad goaltending, so much else went wrong that series that it was arrogant to just pin the defeat on a vague principle.
That was a fun team, one that played fast across all four lines. You could denigrate players like Miles Wood, Jesper Boqvist, and Yegor Sharangovich, but their speed and/or skill in depth roles had to be accounted for.
Over the next two seasons, those players were weeded out for the likes of Tomas Nocek, Curtis Lazar, and Kurtis MacDermid. I count only the Stefan Noesen signing as a Fitzgerald win, and that’s because the team desperately needed a net front presence on the power play.
Here’s where Fitzgerald went wrong: The Panthers won the Stanley Cup last season because their BEST players—Matthew Tkachuk, Aleksander Barkov and Sam Bennett—are also very hard to play against. Unless Fitzgerald wanted to blow up the whole team, the Devils had to find a way to win differently, because guys like Hughes, Meier, and Jesper Bratt aren’t consistently as hard-nosed in battles—only Nico Hischier measures up in that regard.
Only you won’t find anyone else talking about this, and I highly doubt it will come up as much as the Hughes ‘what if?” when Fitzgerald meets with the Devils ownership group after another wasted season.