Put Tuesday’s game out of your mind for a moment.
On Sunday night, New Jersey Devils fans raised eyebrows and perked ears around the league as they repeatedly booed Luke Hughes over two gaffes leading to goals against in their loss to the Carolina Hurricanes. The timing of it feeds into the worst pot-stirrers league-adjacent media has to offer, from speculation about what Bill Guerin is thinking to whether the Devils will be able to keep a defenseman they just signed to seven-year contract this season.
Allowing the media to turn this into “where will the Hughes brothers actually end up” was not just annoying, it shielded four people — Tom Fitzgerald, Sheldon Keefe, Brad Shaw, and Jeremy Colliton — from scrutiny and criticism.
Today, we’ll focus on Tom Fitzgerald. Locking Luke Hughes up over the summer should have been a priority. But after Luke Hughes had a rough start in 2024-25 due to missing camp, Fitzgerald learned nothing and had Hughes miss most of camp again before a deal was done. I was assured that these are professionals and missing camp isn’t a big deal, but why has Luke stagnated or regressed in each of the last two seasons? To reiterate, he missed camp both times, so is it really not a big deal?
But missing camp is just one thing. The content of the contract is another. I repeatedly wrote over the summer about how the Devils could use deferred salary to make it easier to give Luke a long-term extension while better managing the team’s immediate cap issues. Of course, the ask from Pat Brisson ended up higher than originally expected, with Hughes’s camp wanting a $9 million figure rather than an $8 million average annual value to match his brother. So that made the math more difficult. Still, clearing up half a million or more from that cap hit would put the Devils in a much better position now. And for Luke, who is being paid $9 million this season, having some of that money deferred to a 2032 payout would more accurately reflect the expected growth of his skills over the course of his contract.
For fans seeing a player make bad plays, the money that player is making factors much more into the fan reaction than those players might expect. Luke Hughes is not on an entry-level contract anymore. And as much as I would like to say he’s at an age where he should be able to make mistakes, learn, and grow, he’s going to be treated like a player making $9 million, or nearly 10% of the team’s salary cap. Maybe Brisson and Hughes would not have been interested in deferral, but they still would have gotten the money while making the Devils’ situation easier this season while also being able to say, actually, Luke is only making $4 million this season because of deferrals.
But, to my knowledge — as I never saw it reported as an option on the table — Fitzgerald never brought deferral up with Luke’s camp. So, with Fitzgerald probably feeling like he had to go long-term after Jim Rutherford’s tamper-y comments about the Hughes brothers, the Devils got their worst-case scenario outcome for a Hughes extension from a salary cap standpoint. The Devils were then handcuffed, nobody seems eager to bail Fitzgerald out of his mess, and the fans were directing more ire at Luke Hughes than they should have on Sunday. While he’s at an age where he should still be growing, fans treat him like he’s at an age where he should be a complete product.
Flash forward from there to Tuesday.
If Devils fans were frustrated with the team in a 3-1 loss to Carolina on Sunday, they should be infuriated after the loss on Tuesday. They should carry that rage with them for the rest of the season.
I do not think the absolute core of the Devils is at fault for this slide — that is, Nico Hischier, Jack Hughes, and Luke Hughes. Luke is obviously still too young and underdeveloped to flip this team on its head at will, but Nico and Jack were not at fault or even in the play for any of the nine goals against on Tuesday night. On the only goal allowed by Markstrom with Nico and Jack on the ice, Luke Hughes had made a good defensive play on a rush against after the Devils’ power play expired, but Markstrom did not track the puck and opened his five hole wide for Casey Cizikas.
Nico Hischier and Jack Hughes can only play so many minutes. I can say that they need to finish on one or two of those chances they had on Tuesday, but scoring one goal isn’t going to stop the rest of the team from imploding. Hockey is a team sport where your second and third lines matter just as much as your first: the best playoff teams are those who can trust three scoring lines to handle 15 to 20 minutes of work a night. Having a balanced attack means a more tired opponent, and a more tired opponent tends to make more mistakes against top players.
Nothing can help having a goalie that can give up nine goals on 23 shots, on just 1.62 expected goals against. Again, it’s one thing if this is just another season for the goaltender, knowing that the team could maybe move on from him during or after the season. But Jacob Markstrom has a no-move clause, and General Manager Tom Fitzgerald rushed to sign Markstrom to a two-year, $12 million extension. Where was this rush for Luke Hughes? Why did Luke Hughes miss camp just so Brisson could still come out seemingly with exactly what their camp wanted while Jacob Markstrom gets a two-year extension — at no discount — eight months before he was due to be a free agent?
Perhaps if the Devils did not have two old goaltenders, Sheldon Keefe might have been willing to pull Markstrom after five goals. Maybe we wouldn’t have gotten so angry had that happened. But Jake Allen often deals with a cramping issue from overuse, and Keefe wants to win a game tonight. I don’t blame him for saving Allen for today, even if Keefe should always have a backup he’s willing to insert into the game. If he doesn’t, it’s a roster construction issue. It’s not like either of these goalies are on pace to play more than 50 games, let alone 60 or 70. He should have a backup ready to go. If he doesn’t, they are too old to play together without a third in the mix.
I might be a little more moderate on firing Tom Fitzgerald than some Devils writers and fans, but the pressure is mounting. If you haven’t read Jared’s piece from yesterday afternoon, I suggest you do so. Fitzgerald is hardly the only questionable figure in the organization, and it does not seem like the organization actually has an internal option who would be an improvement from Fitzgerald. Personally, I think Fitz should be given a few more weeks, but he should not be allowed to run a trade deadline if the team is still out of it by February.
But Fitzgerald has saddled the team with too much baggage. No-move clauses, no-trade clauses, $6 million for Ondrej Palat, and a two-year extension for Markstrom makes this team’s situation much more difficult to manage than it should be. For all of the rumors from Friedman or whoever else, how can this team even add forwards? Even if they did move Palat, likely paying a team to take him off their hands, that would only free up enough cap space to activate Johnny Kovacevic from long-term injured reserve.
For a team that is struggling to score as much as the Devils — this is certainly the worst-finishing team in the NHL — moving Dougie Hamilton will only make the defense even more inept at moving the puck. Dougie has certainly had a lot of issues after injuring his knee for the second time in a year, but the Devils just do not get shots on goal when he’s off the ice. So are we really trusting Fitzgerald to make the right move here, likely losing a Hamilton trade to make room for a no-offense defenseman in Johnny Kovacevic?
Of course, the Devils should have defensive impact players. The problem is they don’t have enough offensive impact players along with an incredibly inconsistent goaltending tandem. Fitzgerald has to own that, and his only way of improving the offensive situation while staying under the cap is to hope that one of his prospects can come up from the AHL and make a difference. But there’s a problem with that, too: Devils scouting has fallen off a cliff from the Shero years to now. The team has one solid option to improve the offense up front, and that’s Lenni Hameenaho, who has played only 30 games in the AHL. The fact that there are so few young players who can be given a chance in the NHL is another indictment of Fitzgerald, who was running the Devils in rebuild mode until not even four years ago. The end of the rebuild should be coming into their own now, but the mid-range prospects are entirely missing. If it’s not coming from top picks like Luke, Nemec, and Mercer, the Devils have nothing.
The Devils are paying the price now, reliant on veterans who can’t score a goal to save their lives.
For more on those players, keep an eye out for Gerard’s article later today.
