The Devils have spent the offseason clearing space, solving problems, and giving themselves options. That part is real. What’s still unclear is whether all that maneuvering has actually made them a better hockey team.
Sunny Mehta walked into a roster with a pile of issues, and a lot of them have been addressed. Sheldon Keefe is staying on as head coach.
Nico Hischier has been re-signed. Simon Nemec is no longer the Devils’ problem after being traded to the Calgary Flames, and Jacob Markstrom’s contract has also been moved off the books.
New faces like Evan Rodrigues and Jesper Boqvist give the bottom six more versatility, and the Devils even took a swing at Barrett Hayton on an offer sheet before Utah matched it.
So yes, the situation looks cleaner now. The Devils also have two extra first-round picks from the Nemec trade and a projected $36M in cap space for 2027-28, a number that includes Hischier’s new deal. On paper, that’s a much better setup than the one Mehta inherited.
But paper doesn’t win games.
A recent Puckmarks tweet estimated each team’s offseason gains in wins above replacement, and the Devils came out surprisingly high with 2.1 WAR, good for fourth in the NHL. The catch is that the three teams ahead of them were all division rivals: Washington, the Rangers, and Philadelphia. Several of the teams right behind New Jersey are in the Eastern Conference too, which matters in a league where the path to the playoffs is already crowded.
Philadelphia made the postseason and won a playoff series last year. Washington is being picked by plenty of people to get back in after missing out.
The Rangers, for all their flaws, were clearly built to avoid another season as one of the NHL’s bottom four teams. They may still be shaky, but they should be better than they were.
That’s the backdrop for New Jersey’s offseason. The arms race is on, especially in an East that saw the defending champion Florida Panthers miss the playoffs one year and figure to come back hard the next.
The Devils finished 13th out of 16 teams in the conference last season, and they were 11 points out of the final playoff spot in the Metropolitan Division. They also finished 26 points behind the Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes, who remain the standard in the division and a team the Devils still haven’t figured out.
Getting into the playoffs is one hurdle. Doing something once they get there is another.
That’s why the Devils’ offensive outlook still feels like the biggest question. The forward group is better in the bottom six, but it hasn’t done much to change the fact that New Jersey finished with a conference-worst 230 goals for last season.
You can point to the upside: a full season from Jack Hughes, bigger steps from Arseny Gritsyuk and Luke Hughes, bounceback years from Jesper Bratt and Timo Meier. Those are all reasonable paths forward.
They’re just not guarantees. At this point, they have to be proven, not assumed.
The same goes for the younger depth names. Amadeus Lombardi and Vladislav Kolyachonok could earn roles and help, but they’re still unknowns.
Mehta deserves credit for making smart, measured bets there. It’s just hard to build expectations around players who haven’t shown it yet.
There’s also the question of what the Devils lost along the way. Nemec was a defensive problem, and moving him out should help on that side.
But the Devils also gave up his offense, and that matters too. The same caution applies to Cody Glass, whose scoring output may not be easy to repeat.
Then there’s the crease. Even if Jacob Markstrom was one of the worst goaltenders in the NHL last season, the plan of rolling into 2026-27 with Jake Allen, Nico Daws, and David Rittich does not automatically solve anything.
Allen will be 36 next season. Daws is still relatively unproven.
Rittich is a career backup who struggled in the second half of last season.
The Devils probably are better in their bottom six with Rodrigues and Boqvist replacing Evgenii Dadonov and Paul Cotter. They may also be improved in the neutral zone and on the forecheck, along with the other little things that don’t always show up in the box score. But that’s a familiar story around here, and it hasn’t always translated into actual results.
None of this is a knock on Mehta’s approach. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are championship teams.
He inherited a mess from Tom Fitzgerald, and a lot of the cleanup work had to happen before the real roster-building could begin. That knot has mostly been untangled now.
The question is what comes next.
It’s the middle of July, the free-agent class has been picked over, and the big names on the trade market don’t seem to have the Devils on their approved lists. Maybe Mehta still finds a way to make a bigger move.
Maybe some of the ideas floating around elsewhere become real. But right now, it looks more like tinkering around the edges than a dramatic leap forward.
That doesn’t mean the Devils are stuck. It does mean they’re still waiting on the kind of move that changes the conversation from flexibility to results.
For now, they’re positioned to do something. The next step is finding out whether that something is enough.
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The fallout from that case reached far beyond a single transaction. New Jersey came out of it with a cornerstone defenseman who helped define the franchises identity, and the whole episode became part of the reason the NHL eventually tightened its offer-sheet rules. For Devils fans, it remains one of those bizarre what-if moments in league history, the kind that still hangs over how a dynasty can be traced back to a decision no one saw coming. [Read more 🡒]