What went wrong for the Devils this season?

It’s been a disappointing season for the New Jersey Devils, who going into Sunday are 29-29-2 with 60 points, seventh in the Metropolitan and the second-worst team in the Eastern Conference. Through 60 games in 2025-26, none of their players have hit the 50-point mark and only one, Nico Hischier, has scored 20 goals.

On last Friday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton are joined by James Nichols of New Jersey Hockey Now to discuss the Devils’ struggles and what’s the main cause for why they’re on pace to miss the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the second time in three seasons.

Tyler Yaremchuk: I want to start with the “big picture” — what led to this season going so bad? And I know that’s a very vague question

James Nichols: It’s a lot of things, starting with the roster construction. They didn’t have the depth scoring that they thought they were going to have. They weren’t getting support down low when the rest of the team wasn’t going. It was certainly a depth thing.

Obviously, Jack Hughes getting injured … anytime he gets hurt, the Devils fall off a bit. And the goaltending was a bit of a problem, with Jacob Markstrom really struggling this year and Jake Allen was much stronger.

But that’s the crux of it there: the goaltending was bad, the forward group just can’t score, and it seems like this roster was built to play a defensive style that was going to rely on their goaltending, and they’re not really leaning into their strengths as an offensive powerhouse, which they’ve been and we’ve seen in seasons past.

Certainly, there’s a lot to look at as to why this all went south, and it’s going to be interesting. I don’t anticipate them making the playoffs, so this summer is going to be interesting to see what kind of surgery they do and what direction they go in terms of what’s the identity here.

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…