Where Can the Devils Get Enough Offense to Make Them Contenders?

Timo Meier was strong at the end of the season and in the playoffs. Can he bring that across all of 2025-26? | Photo by Rich Graessle/NHLI via Getty Images

The energy around the New Jersey Devils seems to be very negative right now. Many are concerned that Tom Fitzgerald has not done enough to improve the roster, and no shortage of talking heads have criticized the team’s depth ahead of the 2025-26 season. I do not think the situation is really as dire as many are making it out to be, but I agree that there are problem areas that need to be improved on from year-to-year. Since the Devils most struggled with offensive production last season, I want to zero

in on where the Devils can find improvements in the coming season. First up: Timo Meier.

Timo Meier Needs to Score More: A System Problem or a Player Problem?

Timo Meier has been recorded having over 500 shot attempts in three seasons: 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2024-25. Essentially, ever since Meier has become one of the better goal scorers in the league, he has averaged over 500 shot attempts per year. However, Timo struggled with one thing in 2024-25: getting those shots on net. Some of might be posts (I do remember him hitting several), but Meier largely struggled to score because he was missing the net. Here’s how those three seasons broke down:

• 2021-22: 573 shot attempts, 326 on goal, 35 goals
• 2022-23: 599 shot attempts, 327 on goal, 40 goals
• 2024-25: 525 shot attempts, 238 on goal, 26 goals

You can see this in HockeyViz’s finishing sub-skill breakdown below, which reflects his decline in getting shot attempts on goal:

HockeyViz

Thankfully for the Devils, Meier was still a good offensive player in 2024-25 because of the sheer volume of shots he puts on goals. However, he could boost his numbers by apparently being a little less fine with his shot. Compared to five slap shot goals on 2.2 xG from 56 slap shots last season, Meier had only 15 wrist shot goals off of 17.7 xG from 376 such shots. Scoring on slap shots is actually an area that hit the back burner when Travis Green replaced Andrew Brunette in Lindy Ruff’s staff, and he took 26 more slap shots under Keefe and Colliton than he did in Ruff’s final season, when he scored most of his goals by getting to the net.

In Keefe and Colliton’s offense, the netfront scoring role was mostly filled by Nico Hischier, followed by Stefan Noesen and Dawson Mercer. Nobody else on the roster really did so successfully. I actually think that this is a positive change. Aside from 2023-24, Timo Meier has always created his offense by shooting from all parts of the offensive zone, scoring at a higher percentage than league average on his rangier shots and scoring on a below-average percentage of his shots closer to the goal.

This does give points to the “Timo Meier is a right wing” crowd, as moving him back to his off-wing would allow him to fire more of those one-timers and slap shots from the faceoff circle on that side. And on his finishing map from HockeyViz, he is significantly more successful shooting from that off-wing than the left. However, something that improved significantly in Meier’s season lining up on Hischier’s left was his on-ice defensive results. See below, with data from Natural Stat Trick:

• 2022-23: 56.02 CF%, 177-140 SF-SA, 18-15 GF-GA — 3.63 GF/60, 3.02 GA/60, 59.41 xGF%
• 2023-24: 50.54 CF%, 464-508 SF-SA, 43-58 GF-GA — 2.6 GF/60, 3.51 GA/60, 49.44 xGF%
• 2024-25: 53.31 CF%, 592-532 SF-SA, 48-33 GF-GA — 2.39 GF/60, 1.65 GA/60, 54.53 xGF%

This made 2024-25 the most dominant five-on-five season of Meier’s career in terms of relative impact on goal differential, with a +12.31% deviation from the average Devil. His highest was +20.63% on a very bad Sharks team in 2021-22, while he posted +4.55% and -5.96% impacts in his prior years as a Devil. The only season in which Meier posted a negative expected goal differential impact was in 2023-24, when Ruff was maligned for mostly leaving him on the left side.

While the five-on-five scoring has not bounced back to his San Jose levels, Meier excelled defensively under Keefe as a left-wing. One question is: can Meier improve his scoring and keep up his defense if he shifts to playing primarily on his off-wing again? If he does not get back to being a top goal scorer, the bottom six will be tested yet again.

The Bottom Six Problem: Did the Moves Fix the Issue?

I wrote about it in the playoffs: the top six wins their matchups, but the bottom six was so bad that only Gretzkyan performances would have been able to win the series. And at that point, Erik Haula and Ondrej Palat were playing top-six roles, and Timo Meier had moved back to right wing to accommodate. Stefan Noesen also moved down to line three in the never-again-to-be-repeated Cotter-Glass-Noesen line, in which Paul Cotter repeatedly showed why I was concerned about him playing above the fourth line.

Swapping Haula, Tatar, Bastian, Lazar, and Dowling out for Brown, Dadonov, Gritsyuk, and others will do a lot to inject offensive ability into the bottom six, whether those three new Devils play on the third or fourth line or if they push players like Palat down the lineup. Let’s look at scoring rates among groups of players last season (PP = primary points; AEV TOI = average 5v5 time on ice). Former players are also italicized:

Always in the Top Six:

• Jack Hughes: 15:20 AEV TOI, 1.01 G/60, 0.82 A1/60, 0.25 A2/60 (2.08/60 — 1.83 PP/60)
• Jesper Bratt: 13:19 AEV TOI, 0.67 G/60, 1.06 A1/60, 0.56 A2/60 (2.28/60 — 1.73 PP/60)
• Nico Hischier: 14:18 AEV TOI, 1.06 G/60, 0.5 A1/60, 0.22 A2/60 (1.79/60 — 1.56 PP/60)
• Timo Meier: 15:02 AEV TOI, 0.8 G/60, 0.35 A1/60, 0.5 A2/60 (1.65/60 — 1.15 PP/60)

Somtimes Top Six, Sometimes Bottom Six:

• Stefan Noesen: 12:32 AEV TOI, 0.49 G/60, 0.74 A1/60, 0.18 A2/60 (1.41/60 — 1.23 PP/60)
• Dawson Mercer: 13:34 AEV TOI, 0.59 G/60, 0.49 A1/60, 0.22 A2/60 (1.29/60 — 1.08 PP/60)
• Ondrej Palat: 12:15 AEV TOI, 0.7 G/60, 0.25 A1/60, 0.38 A2/60 (1.34/60 — 0.95 PP/60)
• Erik Haula: 12:04 AEV TOI, 0.58 G/60, 0.29 A1/60, 0.22 A2/60 (1.08/60 — 0.86 PP/60)

Mostly Bottom Six:

• Cody Glass: 12:33 AEV TOI, 0.68 G/60, 1.02 A1/60, 0.34 A2/60 (2.05/60 — 1.71 PP/60)
• Paul Cotter: 12:14 AEV TOI, 0.93 G/60, 0.19 A1/60, 0.12 A2/60 (1.24/60 — 1.12 PP/60)
• Tomas Tatar: 10:06 AEV TOI, 0.48 G/60, 0.16 A1/60, 0.4 A2/60 (1.04/60 — 0.64 PP/60)
• Curtis Lazar: 9:22 AEV TOI, 0.27 G/60, 0.27 A1/60, 0.13 A2/60 (0.67/60 — 0.54 PP/60)
• Nate Bastian: 9:55 AEV TOI, 0.2 G/60, 0.31 A1/60, 0.2 A2/60 (0.72/60 — 0.51 PP/60)
• Justin Dowling: 9:59 AEV TOI, 0.12 G/60, 0.23 A1/60, 0.35 A2/60 (0.69/60 — 0.35 PP/60)

Additions:

• Evgenii Dadonov (DAL): 12:15 AEV TOI, 0.8 G/60, 0.49 A1/60, 0.37 A2/60 (1.65/60 — 1.29 PP/60)
• Connor Brown (EDM): 11:53 AEV TOI, 0.62 G/60, 0.43 A1/60, 0.55 A2/60 (1.6/60 — 1.05 PP/60)
• Arseni Gritsyuk (SKA — KHL): 14:17 AEV TOI, ~1.2 G/60, ~1.45 to 1.71 A/60 (~2.65-2.91/60 — unknown primary assists)

Please note that I used Gritsyuk’s available statistics, which include even strength and power play ice time splits as well as goal scoring splits. It does not include assist splits. Given that Gritsyuk played only PP2 minutes (, with 3 power play goals to 14 even strength goals, I estimated that somewhere between 7 and 10 of his 27 assists came on the power play. Also note that the KHL is more restrictive with awarding secondary assists, with only literal secondary passes to the goal scorer counting. Ultimately, Gritsyuk had 44 points in 49 games while playing only 16:10 per game, so he was extremely efficient as a scorer, and he mostly did it at even strength.

A lot of the hand-wringing about the Devils not having done enough in the 2025 offseason seems to be predicated on the assumption that Dadonov, Brown, and Gritsyuk will suddenly turn into pumpkins the moment they put on Devils sweaters. On the contrary, I think that Gritsyuk will thrive in the NHL if he has less of the KHL leash that young Russians often get stuck to. There’s evidence that, minute for minute, Gritsyuk was the best player on SKA in 2024-25, but he took a backseat to accommodate veterans such as Evgeny Kuznetsov and Mikhail Grigorenko, likely to the team’s self-inflicted detriment. Additionally, Brown has been ticking up as more time has passed since his knee injury, and Dadonov has not slowed down as a scorer in the NHL. In any case, replacing players like Haula, Tatar, and Bastian with those three represent a doubling (from Haula) or tripling (from Tatar and Bastian) of even strength production if their rates hold. Yes, Gritsyuk will likely score less in the NHL, but there is little reason to disbelieve that he is ready for a third or second line role in the league.

Sheldon Keefe’s Second Year

When Sheldon Keefe took over for Mike Babcock in 2019, he took over a Maple Leafs team that was all offense and zero defense. In the following bubble season, the Leafs turned into a top-ten defensive team while not seeing much decline in the goal scoring department. Across his remaining years in Toronto, the defense vacillated between top-of-the-league and middling, while the offense stayed consistently at the top. He was clearly a coach trying to alleviate the deficiencies of a roster led by Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, and John Tavares, but he also had significant supporting scorers (not all at the same time) in Zach Hyman, Jason Spezza, Calle Jarnkrok, Michael Bunting, Alexander Kerfoot, Matthew Knies, Pierre Engvall, Ilya Mikheyev. Most importantly, all of those guys were able to play Keefe’s game while being reliable sources of middle six offense.

Meanwhile, Auston Matthews had his best seasons under Sheldon Keefe. He hit 60 goals in Keefe’s first full non-Covid season (year three of five, total) and 69 goals in Keefe’s final year in Toronto. Willy Nylander turned from an inconsistent, struggling player under Babcock into an offensive force under Keefe. Mitch Marner’s best even strength offensive season came in Keefe’s first non-Covid season with the team. We might have felt like going from Ruff to Keefe limited the offense of the Devils in 2024-25, but the reality may have been that the Devils’ bottom six was full of players who could score in a run-and-gun system, but not a balanced one. However, five of the six Devils who were unable to crack one primary point per 60 five-on-five minutes are no longer on the team.

I would like to see more even strength offense from the four core forwards on the roster, but I expect them to have a better time if A. their third linemates can actually score (i.e. exchanging Palat for Dadonov or Gritsyuk) and B. the third line actually needs to be respected as a scoring threat. Some changes, like putting Meier at right wing, might help the Devils get more scoring out of their top lines, but they need to be thoughtful of who actually compliments Hischier and Meier best. Is it Noesen at left wing? Is it Gritsyuk? Is it Mercer?

But does Mercer have to play third-line center? The Meier-Hischier-Mercer line outscored opponents at a two-to-one rate in the 2024-25 season, and Cody Glass excelled in his regular season games before Jacob Markstrom took him out as collateral damage in his attempt to take a game misconduct slashing penalty on Andrei Svechnikov in Game 1 against Carolina. Does Glass finally find his offense in a system as defensively sound as Keefe’s? At worst, he can be a shutdown center. At best, this might be the situation, with new additions in the bottom six, that allows Glass to blossom in a way he once previewed in Nashville.

Tom Fitzgerald did not do anything flashy in the 2025 offseason, but the more I look into it, the more I think he successfully targeted the worst offensive underperformers to be replaced. Doing this should give Sheldon Keefe a team more compatible with what he is trying to accomplish on the ice, and seeing that Toronto’s top guys had their best offense under Keefe from years three to five of his tenure gives me more reason to think that the Devils are still on the upswing, and not stagnating. Do not forget that it had been 13 years since a first-year Devils coach took the team to the playoffs, when the Devils were still pretty much an automatic playoff team when coached by anyone other than John MacLean. And each time the Devils won the Cup, it was after making the playoffs for consecutive seasons.

Your Thoughts

I had planned to write about conditioning this weekend, but I am pushing that to Friday. I may also write about blueliner puck movement, but I’m probably not as down on our defensemen as puck movers as some people.

Do you think Timo Meier can boost his scoring back to his San Jose levels? Do you think Sheldon Keefe will get more out of the offense in year two? What do you think of the concerns that the Devils have not done enough to change their roster? Do you think they’re based in truth? Or is anxiety clouding fan judgement? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for reading.

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• Let’s Re-Do the 2015-16 New Jersey Devils Season in EHM: December 2015
• Beware: October Offensive Woes
• Devils Sign Gormley to One Year Contract
• Injuries Hurt Devils Much More than Most
• Devils Will Need Their Youth to Power the Bottom Six
• Team with our drafted player only