How much should the Devils sell at the trade deadline?
The trade deadline is the ultimate delineation point in the NHL’s regular season. The contenders declare themselves by making win-now deals for the stretch run. The also-rans sell off their spare parts, effectively punting on the season to prepare for the future. Then you have teams like this year’s New Jersey Devils, who came in with high expectations but are staring down the barrel of a losing season.
With 58 points through 59 games, the Devils are 13 points back of the third seed in the Metropolitan Division and 14 points back of the second wild card spot in the Eastern Conference. New Jersey’s place in the standings suggests they should be sellers, but without any obvious trade pieces and with the hopes of bouncing back next season, the Devils may not be able to salvage many future assets from an otherwise lost season.
On Friday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton were joined by New Jersey Hockey Now‘s James Nichols to discuss how the Devils could approach March 6th’s trade deadline.
Tyler Yaremchuk: Usually when teams are in a spot like the Devils, it’s like “Alright, who are the pending UFAs? We’re trading three guys and getting some draft picks back and that’s what we’re going to say we got out of this season.” But they don’t really have a lot of pending UFAs that would have a lot of value. What do you think (Devils general manager Tom) Fitzgerald is going to do in the next week? How big could the sell-off get, or will there simply be no sell-off?
James Nichols: There’s a lot of chatter about how this is a buyer’s market, but a lot of teams are scared to blink. We’re waiting for that dam to really break. There’s been a couple of big trades, but they’ve been niche trades, where it was like a player such as (Artemi) Panarin has these certain destinations he wants to go to. But the frenzy hasn’t really begun, and I think it’s because a lot of teams are nervous to get going.
For a team like the Devils, you’re right, they don’t have a ton of pending UFAs, so they’re going to have to get creative. We all saw what happened earlier in the season with the Dougie Hamilton discourse. I think that’s something that could still happen at the deadline, and if it doesn’t happen maybe that’s a draft-day move. But if a team steps up and certainly is looking for a right-shot defenseman, those don’t grow on trees and we saw what he could do after he had maybe a kick in the butt that went public, and he started scoring all those goals and reeling in all those points and playing a much more pointed game than I saw him playing previously. And then I look at a guy like Cody Glass, who has one year left on a really favorable cap hit. That’s probably something that a lot of teams would look at and say “That’s a third-line center at a 20-goal pace. We’ll pay up for that guy.”
You can catch the full discussion and the rest of Friday’s episode here…