A few weeks ago, I posed the question of what the Devils could do to shake things up.
I laid out all the options, from firing the GM and/or the coach, to making a trade, to calling up a prospect from Utica to healthy scratching a veteran player.
Despite this, there were no changes of note after Luke Hughes allowed two own goals against Carolina. No changes of note after a demoralizing 9-0 loss to the Islanders that felt like a “that’s gotta be it, someone’s getting fired for this” type of loss. It
took a 4-1 loss to the Penguins where the Devils felt perfectly comfortable finding their, for lack of a better term, “scapegoat” in Dougie Hamilton and announced he would be a healthy scratch.
Hamilton’s benching was something I literally pointed out as an option in the article I linked above, so I’m not going to turn around and all of a sudden scream “Do something…..no, NOT LIKE THAT.” If anything, the Devils should go further when it comes to scratching underperforming veterans who have restrictive no-trade clauses and do the same with Ondrej Palat, regardless of the fact that he scored twice in Minnesota. One good game doesn’t erase a poor body of work overall.
To be clear, I have no issue with their initial decision to scratch Hamilton. I don’t care what his advanced stats say. He’s being paid $9M AAV to produce points. Prior to the Minnesota game, he had 10 points in 40 games this season. That’s not nearly good enough. Add in the fact that if you actually watch the games instead of just looking at charts, Hamilton looked like a guy who was content going through the motions, perhaps because of all of the trade speculation going on in the background. Benching the highest paid player on your roster, given this context, made sense. Especially if your goal was to try to send a message to the rest of the room by handling a respected veteran in this manner.
Keep in mind, the Devils tried, and failed, to trade Hamilton over the summer (which was something that I said they should consider doing). The Sharks were reportedly interested. Hamilton was not, as he exercised his no-trade clause, as is his right to do so.
The Devils tried, and failed, to trade Hamilton at some point this season when the Quinn Hughes situation came to a head in Vancouver. They were unable to move him as he used his no-trade protection once again, and Quinn Hughes ultimately went to Minnesota.
Whether or not you agreed with the decision to bench Hamilton, the Devils were at least acknowledging that there was indeed a problem and that they had to do something. This is actually a huge deal considering Fitzgerald’s history of sitting on his hands until they go numb, which is something he’s done in each of the last two seasons. The Devils ‘plan’ of doing nothing, predictably, didn’t work. Much like it didn’t work two years ago when that season spiraled out of control. Much like it didn’t work last year when the team struggled from the Christmas break on. In that respect, kudos to the Devils for taking the first step to saying “this team has issues”.
Unless they change their minds, of course. Which the Devils did, because they’re a directionless organization.
They’re the only team out of the 32 in the NHL that could screw up a “statement” benching.
Only the Devils would create a circus and draw unwanted attention to themselves by benching their highest-paid player ONLY to then turn around and re-insert Hamilton into the lineup after ONE Game and bench Simon Nemec after the GM of the team said he was “easily our best defenseman” 48 hours earlier. Congratulations, you annoyed multiple players in the process.
Only Tom Fitzgerald, who is quick to go on a media tour and be a guest on every radio show in Canada when things are going well with the Devils but goes into hiding when the team is struggling and fans are begging for answers, would rush to get the Devils side of the story out there through Pierre LeBrun once Hamilton’s agent J.P. Barry airs the dirty laundry.
Hamilton literally hadn’t even sat a game yet and the Devils already started backtracking and doing damage control on their decision. While one could argue that Nemec’s benching was warranted after the Winnipeg game, let’s be real……the team made this decision prior to taking the ice in Winnipeg. Nemec could’ve played a perfect game and scored the game winning goal and it wouldn’t have mattered. Whether it was Fitzgerald and/or Keefe who finally made a big boy decision to change something that clearly wasn’t working almost doesn’t matter. With the Devils immediately going back on it, the team showed no backbone and no conviction in their process. They showed there’s no teeth or substance to a supposed benching with the player literally drawing back in the very next night. And that’s before one starts playing the “what about” game with other players who have had their struggles but have yet to have ice time cut or be scratched.
Are they now going to bench Hamilton again after one of his better games of the season? Keefe already said that Nemec is going back in, so who is it for? Will it be for Johnathan Kovacevic or Brett Pesce after Fitzgerald went to bat for them as well? Or will the Devils walk that back as well?
This is clown show stuff from the Devils organization. There’s no other way to frame it.
I don’t know if they’re kowtowing to pressure from Hamilton’s agent (who ironically represents both Hamilton and Nemec) or there’s some sort of internal disconnect between the GM and the coach, but this is a mess regardless.
It’s Not Just Fitzgerald Who Is Directionless
Much like Ned Flanders’ parents, the Devils have tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.
It’s the same thing the Devils do every year when Fitzgerald sits on his hands and doesn’t do anything to help a floundering team, and it’s the same thing that continues to not work when they do it. Nor have the Devils done anything on a larger scale.
They haven’t fired Fitzgerald, despite a body of work where such a firing would be justified, like say, the Buffalo Sabres did. On a related note, the Sabres are 10-2 since dismissing Kevyn Adams.
They haven’t fired Sheldon Keefe, which, I don’t even know how much that would even have an impact with the roster the Devils built. Keefe might not be able to squeeze blood from a stone, but I fail to see how he’s maximizing what the Devils currently have either. Columbus fired their coach earlier this week and while its too early to say how that will play out (they are 1-0 under Rick Bowness), at least they’re trying to do something to salvage their season, which is more than one can say about Fitzgerald for the third year in a row.
They haven’t even so much as fired an assistant coach like the Toronto Maple Leafs did when they fired Marc Savard. One might scoff at the impact firing an assistant coach may have, but it goes noted that Toronto is 8-0-2 since they made that change. And it’s not like the Devils haven’t had an abject failure of an assistant coach on staff for years where a change there has been long overdue.
I’m not saying the Devils would all of a sudden go on some magical run where once they fire Fitzgerald, or fire Keefe, or fire Dave Rogalski, or make some sort of trade, that would be the catalyst we can all point to as the kick in the pants this team needed.
I will say that you won’t know if you don’t try it. I will say that you are needlessly throwing away another season for no good reason because of your steadfast refusal to do anything of substance until it’s too late.
Call it patience. Call it stubbornness. Call it arrogance. Call it whatever you want. But when this level of underachievement has been going on for three years now at this point, is it actually underachievement or is this who these Devils are? This is a hockey team begging for change in how they operate, except there’s a clear refusal from ownership to the front office to do anything other than the bare minimum and pay their fans lip service, if they’re even willing to do that. Trust the process, courtesy of the owners of an NBA team that has won precisely zero championships adopting that mantra.
To make matters worse, it doesn’t sound like the Devils are inclined to do much of anything to fix the problem. Aside from the aforementioned half-hearted benching of Hamilton that they’ve already walked back.
Elliotte Friedman dove into the Devils situation on his 32 Thoughts podcast and a few things stuck out to me in particular. First, Friedman noting that the expectation is that the Devils will wait for the season to end before they take an internal look at Fitzgerald’s job status.
Sure thing, Devils ownership. Keep doing nothing. That’s been working out so well. Let’s let Fitzgerald continue to dig the hole deeper. What could possibly go wrong? What more do you possibly need to see to know where this is heading?
The second thing that stuck out to me was Friedman pointing out that “up to this point”, Ondrej Palat has not been asked to waive his NTC.
This tells me one of three things. All of them are bad.
It suggests that Palat is that bad of a hockey player where he literally has zero market, and the Devils haven’t gotten calls on him. I don’t know how accurate that is seeing as he’s on The Athletic’s Trade Board and Palat seemingly has a skillset that a playoff contender would want, just not at $6M AAV.
It tells me the Devils have gotten some degree of interest, but things haven’t gotten close enough to where Fitzgerald has approached Palat about waiving (which, if someone else actually is willing to trade for Palat, Fitzgerald should be rushing to get him an Uber to the airport before that team changes their mind).
Or it tells me that Fitzgerald thinks Palat is part of the solution (or is really stubborn about not giving up on his hand-picked signing) and isn’t shopping him, which might be the correct answer as Fitzgerald’s track record of “do nothing” would seemingly check out.
Nothing screams that I should have confidence in this team and the direction they’re heading in like a general manager who is hesitant to admit he made a mistake on one of his biggest free agent signings.
We’re all human. We all make mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind or your opinion on something once you are presented with new information. The problem is that being stubborn and essentially doubling down on what was a bad decision ultimately makes things worse. It’s ok to admit that Palat isn’t the same player he was in 2022 when they signed him, and certainly not the same player he was when he was winning championships in Tampa Bay. That should not be the hill one is willing to die on.
I’m sure if there are any Fitzgerald defenders left, they’ll point out to me in the comments that actually, Fitzgerald has “tried” to do something. He “tried” to get a goalie a few years ago, you see, but trading is hard. You can’t MAKE others trade with you. He “tried” to get Quinn Hughes, so he recognizes the team needs more high end skill. He’s “trying” to make deals now, and has been for awhile, and probably would’ve done so if it were for that tricky thing known as the salary cap.
Perhaps. But again….do or do not. There is no try. It’s his job to figure it out, not just to try to figure it out. And if you have so little flexibility where you can’t do anything because you’re over the cap and you can’t move out the trade clauses you passed out like condoms at Olympic village, we’re now talking about the “We’re all trying to find the guy that did this” meme. Fitzgerald is the guy who put the Devils in this position in the first place, but now I have to hear about how difficult his job actually is when he’s proven incapable of cleaning up the mess he made? Spare me this nonsense.
You don’t get credit for trying. You either fix the issue and win games, or you don’t and you lose games. If the GM and coach are incapable of doing that, it’s on ownership to step in and find people who will. The Devils refusal to do anything in season to fix it and just going through the motions is another example of the organization being directionless.
The Noesen and MacEwen Injuries Provided An Easy Out For Fitzgerald
One of the biggest lingering stories throughout the season has been how were the Devils planning on becoming cap compliant once Johnathan Kovacevic was deemed healthy enough to play and ready to come off of LTIR?
Fitzgerald mentioned in his press conference back in training camp that the team indeed had a plan when the time came to become compliant.
Was that plan to hope somebody, in this case Stefan Noesen and Zach MacEwen, suffer season ending injuries and just moving the money around?
I’m not questioning the validity of the injuries of any of the players involved here. Noesen had been mostly ineffective since his return from groin surgery so a lingering knee injury that required surgery seems plausible. MacEwen has hardly played this year. Hopefully they both have speedy recoveries.
But what would the plan have been had these players been healthy and deemed good enough to play?
Would the plan have been a Dougie Hamilton trade that the team has been unable to make to this point? Would the plan have been an aforementioned Ondrej Palat trade that team might not even be willing to make in the first place? Would it have been something else like making Noesen or Dawson Mercer or someone else a sacrificial lamb to create enough space?
Conversely, could Kovacevic have returned a few weeks earlier when he’s been skating and practicing with the team for some time now? Could Kovacevic have been helping you win some of the games that you’ve been dropping because of how mismanaged the salary cap has been?
We’ll never find out, of course.
Maybe their plan actually was the old Lou Lamoriello adage “If you have time, you use it”, and they figured someone would get injured enough where they could simply plug and play when the time came. Maybe the Devils are better off they didn’t have to make a pure cap dump trade and can now kick this issue to the offseason when they’ll have an easier time cleaning up their books.
But that’s a very “fly by the seat of your pants” approach to managing, and it would appear that Fitzgerald got bailed out due to circumstances here, rather than actually being forced to do something and make a tough decision.
Final Thoughts
Let’s put the win in Minnesota aside for a moment. The Devils have looked lifeless and lethargic for a large enough sample size this season where declaring they’re back after a good win on the road is a fool’s errand. Especially when nobody should trust this Devils team not to no-show tonight against another bad team coming to their building in the Seattle Kraken. I need to see a lot more good hockey from this team over a period of time before I start to forget just how bad they’ve looked.
What would you have said the direction of the Devils should be heading into the season? For me, the answer to that question would be that this is a team that should comfortably be a playoff team and maybe be a Stanley Cup contender if things broke right. It’s not that they didn’t have questions that needed to be answered, but given the financial commitments made to the roster, the state of the league, and the state of the Devils roster, that seemed like a reasonable goal.
The Devils could still get there, as they’re a hot week or two away from getting back into a playoff spot. Not that there’s any reason for me to believe in them given their recent body of work, but the roster is as healthy as it’s going to be the rest of the way and this is a team that has already shown this season they can string together several good weeks of hockey. There’s a reason that I wrote a few weeks ago I was cautiously optimistic about this group, even if they ultimately prove that I’m a big, dumb idiot for believing in them.
The problem is that they’re a team that, until they benched and un-benched Hamilton, has refused to try anything of substance to change their trajectory. Doing nothing and hoping the problem fixes itself isn’t a plan, and when this is happening for the third year in a row, someone needs to attempt to put their thumb on the scale to get this team heading in the right direction. Whether that’s ownership, the GM, the coach, or the players themselves, somebody needs to step up and say this is not acceptable and it’s not going to continue to happen. And then they need to go out there and SHOW it’s not acceptable because it’s not enough to just say it.
If you are indeed a ‘win now’ team and you’re “all in”, be all in. Figure out a way to clean up the cap mess you created like other teams do all the time. And if you have to ruffle feathers along the way like you did with the Hamilton benching, be a man and own it. Own your mistakes instead of tucking your tail between your legs when his agent throws a hissy fit. Acknowledge that what you have been doing isn’t working instead of ignoring the problem like you have a tendency of doing. It might not work, but at least there’s a clear, defined direction of what this team is trying to do. At least if they’re going down, they’re going down swinging.
Conversely, if you’re not “all in”…..I think that’s tough to accept as a fan of this team, but fine. It very well might not be our year. Retool this on the fly. Gauge the market, clean up the books the best you can (tough to do with all of the trade restrictions in place), pick up some extra draft capital and/or prospects, and regroup this summer when you have more flexibility to pivot.
Either way, the Devils need to pick a lane.
