2026-27 NHL team preview: New Jersey Devils
Last Season
After making the Stanley Cup Playoffs in 2024-25, the New Jersey Devils got off to a hot start to the 2025-26 campaign before a combination of injuries, poor goaltending and inconsistent defensive play doomed them to a finish on the outside of the playoff picture.
On Nov. 29, New Jersey owned a record of 16-8-1 and sat one point ahead of the Carolina Hurricanes for first place in the Metropolitan Division. The Hurricanes went on to take over the division and cruise to the Stanley Cup, while the Devils were forced to make major organizational changes as a result of the collapse that ensued.
That particular date came two weeks after star center Jack Hughes suffered a severe cut to his hand as a result of a freak accident at a team dinner that held him out until Dec. 21. Hughes had 20 points in 17 games at the time of his injury, and by the time he returned, the group was clinging to the last playoff spot in the East.
With Hughes back in December, it was the goaltending that continued the decline in January. Jacob Markstrom posted a .875 save percentage in the first year of the month, as keeping the puck out of the net proved to be an ongoing challenge. In January and February, the team did not provide its goaltenders much help, ranking 24th in 5-on-5 high danger scoring chances against per 60 minutes.
A stretch of nine wins in 12 games spanning from Feb. 28 through March 26 still left the Devils 11 points behind the playoff cut line. To make matters worse as the season unraveled, the Minnesota Wild thrived after pulling off a blockbuster trade to acquire Quinn Hughes from the Vancouver Canucks. With younger brothers Jack and Luke already in place, New Jersey was long seen as the obvious landing spot for Quinn if the Canucks opted to move him to shift into a full-blown rebuild. Previous general manager Tom Fitzgerald was of course interested, but due to a high number of no-move/no-trade clauses on the roster and a lack of cap space, the Devils were unable to position themselves to land the star defenseman, allowing Minnesota to swoop in.
Fitzgerald’s inability to unite the three Hughes brothers may not have directly cost him his job, but with a goalie he paid a high price to acquire in Markstrom just a year and a half prior faltering as a team with Stanley Cup aspirations didn’t even come close to making the postseason, it was clearly time for New Jersey to move on. In the spring, the team hired Jersey native and Florida Panthers assistant GM Sunny Mehta to run their front office, leaving the promising young executive to try to piece together a more complete roster for this season.
Key Additions & Departures
Additions
Luke Evangelista, RW
Evan Rodrigues, LW
Colin White, C
Anthony Mantha, RW
David Rittich, G
Jesper Boqvist, F
Declan Chisholm, D
Amadeus Lombardi, F
Departures
Paul Cotter, LW (VAN)
Simon Nemec, D (CGY)
Maxim Tsyplakov, RW (CGY)
Jacob Markstrom, G (FLA)
Zack MacEwen, F (TOR)
Dennis Cholowski, D (NYR)
Offense
The Devils have long struggled to find enough quality wingers to properly support their two star centers in Hughes and captain Nico Hischier. Based on the moves Mehta made this summer, it’s clear he identified that as the easiest portion of the roster to find meaningful upgrades.
In trading Markstrom to both his and the netminder’s former team in the Panthers, Mehta landed Evan Rodrigues, who will provide impactful play-driving ability and some solid scoring depth to a bottom six that has long been a notable weakness. Mehta pounced to sign Anthony Mantha after the first wave of unrestricted free agency, landing a veteran winger with size and scoring touch coming off of a career-best 33-goal season.
Then, Mehta pulled off what could be looked back upon as one of the best moves in the entire league this offseason when he sent a first and second round draft pick to the Nashville Predators to land an emerging young playmaking talent in Luke Evangelista at a remarkably reasonable cost. Now, added to incumbent top-six wingers Jesper Bratt and Timo Meier, New Jersey’s stockpile of impactful wingers looks more like a strength than it does a weakness. With Arseny Gritsyuk, Connor Brown and Dawson Mercer all sliding down the production ladder, their impacts figure to be stronger as well.
Hughes will still be asked to serve as an elite offensive engine with immediate support from Bratt and Hischier. But this forward group now looks like one that won’t allow defenses to hone in so heavily on Hughes and Bratt and could have enough scoring punch to keep the offense afloat in the event of a brief absence or slump from one of the three stars. New Jersey didn’t have a single forward outside of Hughes, Bratt and Hischier finish with more than 44 points last year. So if Mantha (64) and Evangelista (56) can replicate their outputs from a season ago, the supporting cast will be in much better shape.
With better health and greatly improved depth and balance, the Devils look like a solid bet to greatly outperform their placement from last season of 27th in the NHL with just 226 goals for.
Defense
While Mehta was aggressive in changing the look of his forward group, that was in no way the case on defense. The Devils’ Opening Night blue line will most likely be comprised of six players who were in the organization last season in Jonas Siegenthaler, Dougie Hamilton, Luke Hughes, Brett Pesce, Brenden Dillon and Jonathan Kovacevic.
Siegenthaler and Dillon both played in all 82 games last season, while Pesce and Kovacevic each missed more than half of the regular season dealing with injuries. Pesce’s presence as a defensive stabilizer alongside the youngest Hughes brother will be a big factor in the performance of this unit this season, as Luke Hughes was a major disappointment a year ago. The Devils controlled less than 50% of the goals, expected goals and high-danger scoring chances when he was on the ice at 5-on-5 overall, but when paired with Pesce, Hughes was only underwater in terms of goals. The underlyings (53.9% xGF, 52.1% HDCF) looked much stronger when the native of nearby Tarrytown, N.Y. was on the ice with him.
Hamilton is set to return to the team after more than a year of his name being in trade conversations. At least from the outside, it appears that the desire to move on from the veteran offensive blueliner was a fascination that the Fitzgerald front office had that isn’t shared by Mehta’s.
Another signal for the change of philosophy in the front office was the big trade that sent 2022 No. 2 overall pick Simon Nemec to the Calgary Flames for a haul of draft picks. Mehta landed two firsts (one was flipped to nab Evangelista) and a second-rounder as the return. The unit is deep on paper, but it’s also easy to see a world in which Hamilton fails to stay healthy and Hughes does not take the next step, leaving the group entirely without an offensive difference maker on the back end.
But even with the struggles of Nemec and Hughes last year and the long-term absences of Pesce and Kovacevic, New Jersey’s overall team defensive output was respectable. The Devils ranked exactly 16th in the league in 5-on-5 xGA per 60, meaning support from the forwards and the structure of head coach Sheldon Keefe’s system gives the defense a reasonably high floor.
Goaltending
Barring another move still to come, Mehta and the Devils appear set to begin the new campaign with a tandem of Jake Allen and either Nico Daws or David Rittich between the pipes. It’s an interesting call on a number of levels, most notably because Allen is 36 years of age and hasn’t handled a workload larger than 37 games since the 2022-23 season. Daws has just 55 NHL appearances to his name, and Rittich was solid but unspectacular in his role as backup for the New York Islanders last year.
If the brass feels good about a combination of Allen and Daws, it would cost them just $2.9 million against the salary cap. For an analytics-forward general manager like Mehta, the possibility of paying such a low price for the possibility of getting goaltending at or just below league average represents a huge opportunity for surplus value.
But the downsides are immense as well. The Devils were just undone largely by subpar goaltending last season, and while moving on from Markstrom and his contract may be addition by subtraction, but there’s also no surefire upgrade on Markstrom’s results at his workload already within the organization.
To his credit, Allen was quite good last year. His .904 save percentage put him above league average, and his 0.21 goals saved above average per 60 minutes at all situations put him even higher above that benchmark. If Allen can deliver those same results while going from 37 appearances to 45-50, Mehta could look like a genius here.
Coaching
Keefe returns for his third season behind the bench in Newark. The former Toronto Maple Leafs bench boss helped guide a major turnaround from 2024 to 2025, and he’ll look to do it again from 2026 to 2027. Keefe is just four wins away from picking up the 300th of his NHL head coaching career.
There’s plenty of new blood behind the bench, too. Brad Shaw returns for his second year as an assistant alongside Keefe, and the Devils made one of the splashy assistant hires of the summer when they landed Ted Donato, who is heading to the pro game after a 22-year tenure as the head coach at Harvard University.
Keefe also reunites with AJ MacLean, who the team nabbed from the Syracuse Crunch of the AHL. MacLean was Keefe’s assistant with the OHL’s Soo Greyhounds from 2013 to 2015.
Rookies
Look out for 2024 No. 10 overall pick Anton Silayev, a six-foot-seven defenseman with solid mobility. If injuries strike once again on defense, Silayev could seriously change the equation of what the unit looks like moving forward if he impresses. With three full seasons of KHL experience under his belt, he’s already accustomed to playing against men.
Up front, 2023 second-rounder Lenni Hämeenaho could be in the mix for a full-time job with a strong training camp and preseason. Daily Faceoff prospect analyst Steven Ellis ranks him as the No. 4 prospect in New Jersey’s system after he impressed with the Devils’ AHL affiliate Utica Comets in his first season in North America. He’s no longer Calder eligible, but he’s ready to prove himself this year in a more substantial role.
Burning Questions
1. What is Luke Hughes going to be in the NHL? Hughes was drafted with the fourth-overall pick in 2021 not just with the intention of forming a feel good story by playing for his older brother’s team, but with real, legitimate expectations of developing into a top-pairing defenseman in the NHL. Now, three full seasons into his career, Hughes has appeared in fewer games and recorded fewer points every season. We touched on his underlying numbers earlier, but to be less sophisticated, he’s also posted a negative plus-minus rating in all three seasons. He’s already signed to a cap hit of $9 million, and even in the exploding cap environment, he hasn’t played anywhere near a level worthy of that price tag. Last year was supposed to be the year he took the next step. Hughes and the Devils are in it for the long haul either way, but Mehta needs to know if he has a long-term franchise defenseman here or not.
2. Is this really the plan in goal? We live in a world where the Stanley Cup was just won by a tandem consisting of 36-year-old Frederik Andersen and a 27-year-old waiver claim with no prior NHL experience in Brandon Bussi. Set against that context, is a tandem of Allen and Daws really that crazy? Perhaps not, but before the Devils worry about outdoing the champs, they have to contend with the likes of Ilya Sorokin, Logan Thompson and Igor Shesterkin just among teams that missed out on the playoffs last year in their own division. The offensive talent is in place to outscore some issues on the other end, but it’s a huge disadvantage to be at given the quality of such an important position throughout the Metro.
3. What else does Sunny Mehta have up his sleeve? One can’t help but raise an eyebrow over the readily apparent stalling in negotiations between Quinn Hughes and the Wild in a contract extension over the summer. Wild general manager Bill Guerin has made multiple references this offseason to the notion that anybody can be traded, and if his prized acquisition is not interested in signing an extension, could a trade to the destination that always made the most sense be in the cards? The addition of Quinn would make the Devils actual Cup contenders, and with Fitzgerald out of the picture, any hard feelings the brothers may have over the organization not stepping up to bring them all together last season could well be softened.
Prediction
The Devils are going to be in the mix for a playoff spot in the Metropolitan Division, but it’s going to be a fight to grab one. They’re clearly a tier behind Carolina at this point, and the Washington Capitals did even more to improve their roster this summer, likely placing them ahead of New Jersey in the preseason pecking order.
Still, the Devils’ ceiling when healthy is higher than any team in the division save for the Canes. The problem has been getting the goaltending, health and depth scoring to sustain regular season success. The Devils will likely have to surpass both the Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers to make the field, a doable feat but one that would be complicated if the up-and-coming Flyers manage to take the next step many expect.
The coaching and goaltending combinations in Philadelphia and Washington gives those squads considerably higher floors than the Devils. But Mehta’s shrewd moves up front are enough to propel New Jersey past two of those three teams in the Metro. If Carolina repeats as division champs, the winner of the 2-3 matchup in the Metro is pretty much anybody’s guess, but if healthy, the Devils may be better suited than anybody to surprise the reigning Cup champs in a series given the top-end talent that headlines their lineup.
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