There has been a lot of Tom Fitzgerald discourse lately, and rightfully so. Between the New Jersey Devils’ slide down the standings, the general inaction from the front office in addressing this slide,
and perhaps most importantly, the blockbuster Quinn Hughes trade to the Minnesota Wild over the weekend, the fanbase has been given a lot of ammo to fire at their general manager in recent times. Criticism of Fitzgerald has been going on for years of course, but it really does seem to have reached a crescendo over the past month or so. Even I, a certified Fitz defender for a long time, find myself rapidly losing hope that Fitzgerald is the man that can guide the Devils back to the promised land.
At this point, many of you are probably sick of talking about Fitzgerald, just like many of you were probably sick of speculating about trading for Quinn Hughes until Saturday (we’ll still have to do that down the road, but unless Hughes pulls a Rantanen, discussion on Hughes’ future can subside until the summer). But I do feel as though it’s important to discuss how, in my opinion, one part of the Devils’ failings this season is absolutely not Fitzgerald’s fault, while another part absolutely is. I don’t want to just complain about Fitzgerald and the front office without trying to be rational and fair about it. So let’s talk about injuries and inaction, the two defining traits of the 2025-26 New Jersey Devils.
Impossible to Overcome
According to NHL Injury Viz, through December 12, the New Jersey Devils have the third-highest CHIP (Cap Hit of Injured Players) in the league this season. If you’re not familiar with CHIP, it’s basically a way of measuring the impact of injuries a team faces by looking at the cap hits of players lost. After all, raw injury totals don’t exactly tell the whole story because losing someone like Marc McLaughlin is not as impactful as losing someone like Jack Hughes. It’s not a perfect science, as lots of players have bloated AAV’s that they don’t come close to living up to, and plenty of young studs on ELC’s or cheap bridge deals produce at well beyond their cap hit. But it’s a decent method of measuring how impacted by injuries a team is.
All that being said, we do have at least one source that backs up what all our eye tests are telling us: the Devils have been decimated by injuries this season. Comparing New Jersey’s Opening Day lineup (which itself was not at full strength) to the Devils’ lineup from one of their games over the weekend tells the story:
I’m sorry, but you cannot blame Tom Fitzgerald for that.
A season ago, a lack of forward depth proved to be a fatal flaw of this team, which you definitely could blame on Fitzgerald. To his credit, he went out and made what I thought were solid depth additions in the offseason. Connor Brown and Evgenii Dadonov were, on paper, the infusion of speed and skill the Devils sorely needed. Convincing Arseni Gritsyuk to finally make the jump to North America has helped this team immensely. Retaining Cody Glass on a reasonable contract was a shrewd piece of business (even if it took a last-minute pivot to get it done). Yes, the Devils still badly needed a true 3C, but considering how reluctant teams have been since the offseason to make trades, I can’t blame Fitzgerald too much for this.
The problem is that everything Fitzgerald has touched has turned into an IR designation. Every single one of those players I just mentioned either spent time on the shelf earlier this season, or is currently out. Not to mention injuries/absences from irreplaceable players like Jack Hughes and Timo Meier. Heck, perhaps we have to include Brett Pesce and Johnny Kovacevic in that irreplaceable category considering how their usual partners, Luke Hughes and Jonas Siegenthaler respectively, have seen their games take big steps back without them (which might be a story for another day). Fitzgerald could have done a better job building depth, but at full strength, this team should be good enough. Add a 3C and a scoring winger at the deadline, and you should have a legit Stanley Cup contender, particularly in a wide open Eastern Conference.
In the end, I have a hard time pinning all the Devils’ struggles this season on Fitzgerald. The injuries this team has suffered would be hilarious if they weren’t so infuriating. The mantras of “injuries aren’t an excuse” and “next man up” are ingrained in every sports fan’s brain, I understand that. But come on, injuries of this magnitude actually are a reasonable excuse. You can’t win games, let alone championships, when half your starting lineup (including most of the top of your roster) is missing significant time. And that’s not Fitzgerald’s fault.
…But The Injury Excuse Only Goes So Far
However, for as bad as things are in New Jersey, you might have noticed that they were only third in CHIP according to NHL Injury Viz. There are two places where things are worse: Vegas and Florida. Yes, the two most recent Stanley Cup Champions have suffered through an absurd amount of injuries themselves. So for as bad as the Devils’ injuries are, the raft of man games lost has not put them in true outlier territory as of yet.
In fact, injuries appear to be up around the league this season. Back in November, James Mirtle of The Athletic touched on this in the publication’s NHL newsletter, including referencing the very site we used here today as the source for CHIP. Injuries in the NHL are up a lot this season, and while it would be logical to blame the condensed schedule brought about by the Olympic break in Feburary, Mirtle points out that we have not seen a similar spike in injuries in previous Olympic years. The unsatisfying conclusion that Mirtle and NHL Injury Viz come to is that it’s just plain old bad luck that is causing so many injuries across the NHL.
It’s true that the Devils are still near the very top of the league in injuries. But the fact that they aren’t at the very top, coupled with the fact that just about every other team out there is enduring an abnormal amount of injuries, should tell us that the injury excuse only goes so far.
I do want to be fair about this though and point out that it’s not like Vegas and Florida are killing it despite the injuries. Yes, Vegas is currently atop the Pacific Division, but that’s mostly due to an NHL-leading nine loser points. Their 16-6-9 record means they’ve only won one more game than they’ve lost, which is about as middling as you can get. Meanwhile in Florida, the Panthers enter the week out of a playoff spot with a 16-13-2 record. It’s actually kind of funny to think that both the Golden Knights and Panthers are exactly the same with 16 wins in 31 games, more or less on pace with New Jersey’s 18 wins in 33 contests.
The difference, of course, is that those teams have pelts on the wall. The Panthers are back-to-back champs and have won 11 of their last 12 postseason series. The one series they didn’t win in that stretch? That would be the Stanley Cup Final to, you guessed it, the Vegas Golden Knights in June of 2023. So while this season might be disappointing thus far for those teams, they can at least cry themselves to sleep every night while checking out their reflections in their shiny Stanley Cup rings.
But that’s actually a great segue into the part of the Devils’ struggles that you can blame on Fitzgerald. You know what a major factor was in building Stanley Cup winners in Vegas and Florida? Bold roster construction. The same could be said about the Tampa Bay Lightning’s back-to-back Cup winners coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Heck, even the Colorado Avalanche, winners in 2021-22, exhibited incredibly savvy roster-building maneuvers even if they weren’t quite as creative as the other Cup winners this decade.
Because I have an obsession with steel-manning the other side of an argument in an effort to be fair, I should point out that a LOT of luck was involved there too, as it is with every champion in every sport. I am convinced that the Panthers do not win a second Cup if they didn’t get the perfect combo of a long-term injury to Matt Tkachuk and a PED suspension to Aaron Ekblad that helped wipe a ton of cap hit off their books. That allowed them to acquire Brad Marchand and Seth Jones and team them up with Tkachuk and Ekblad, who returned right as the playoffs began, effectively allowing Florida to ice a lineup about $15m above the salary cap. Vegas and Tampa Bay had similar situations where they were able to turn bad injury luck (wink wink) during the regular season into good injury luck (even harder wink wink) when the postseason began. Yes there was obviously salary cap circumvention going on there, but for as fake as we all think the cap is, those maneuvers are impossible to pull off without at least some semblance of actual injuries taking place.
But in addition to that, the Cup winners since the pandemic have absolutely shown a willingness to be bold that Fitzgerald (and frankly, most GM’s) hasn’t. Tampa Bay trading for Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow. Colorado trading for Nazem Kadri. Vegas manipulating the cap in a million different ways and trading for/signing a superstar every year of their existence. Florida trading two core pieces in Mackenzie Weegar and Johnathan Huberdeau for Tkachuk. There are many, many more bold moves by those clubs I could mention, but they are so numerous that I’d rather not bog down this section forever. But that’s the point: These front offices have no issue cutting against the grain, while Fitzgerald seems stuck in conventional hockey thinking.
Losing The Quinn Hughes Auction
As mentioned, Quinn Hughes is now a member of the Minnesota Wild (and has now scored more goals with his new team than Luke Glendening and Juho Lammikko have with the Devils combined). Bill Guerin has seemingly decided that enough is enough, pushing all his chips into the middle, and not just with the Hughes trade. Back in 2021, he decided to take his medicine and buy out both Zach Parise and Ryan Suter, whose dead cap hits were absolutely enormous for a couple seasons. But Guerin apparently thought that desperate times called for desperate measures, so he took the bold step to say goodbye to a pair of franchise staples. Then this past offseason, he signed star winger Kirill Kaprizov to the biggest contract in NHL history. You could absolutely argue that this wasn’t him being bold, it was him being stupid and overpaying. I would argue that it was, in fact, bold though. Guerin took bold action with Kaprizov and got his man regardless of the cost. And finally, he traded a bevy of young players and a premium pick to bring an elite defenseman to his team. Guerin might not have built a Stanley Cup champion yet, but in my opinion, he’s running circles around Fitzgerald as far as GM skill goes.
It’s true that New Jersey just didn’t have the assets to compete with what the Wild sent Vancouver, but that’s also part of the problem. While issues with drafting and developing aren’t the focus of today’s piece, it is obviously a huge part of a general manager’s job. Fitzgerald did not set his organization up to acquire a player of Quinn Hughes’ caliber, which might not be indicative of an unwillingness to take bold action, but it’s indicative of another problem.
But at the same time, I can’t help but feel that Fitzgerald still could have made this work. Sure the Devils didn’t have the center that the Canucks coveted (and no, they absolutely should not trade Nico Hischier under any circumstances), but they still could have offered an enticing package. Between Simon Nemec, Anton Silayev, Seamus Casey, and Ethan Edwards, New Jersey has an armada of young blue chip defense prospects that I think Vancouver would’ve been interested in. At forward, basically anyone not named Hischier, Hughes, Bratt, and Meier should’ve been on the table. Yes, that includes Dawson Mercer and Arseni Gritsyuk. That also includes a prospect like Lenni Hämeenaho. Multiple first round picks should have also been on the table. I understand there is still a good chance Hughes signs in New Jersey in two seasons anyway to play with his brothers. But at that point, he will be two years older, is going to have a MUCH higher cap hit, and at that point you’ve wasted another two seasons of the current core’s Cup window. Quinn Hughes is a player you move heaven and earth to acquire. Guerin understood that. Fitzgerald somehow didn’t.
Then there’s the issue of Fitzgerald handing out no-movement clauses like candy:
As you can see from Novozinsky’s tweet (and in his article if you have an NJ.com subscription), Fitzgerald is like Santa Clause Claus when it comes time to sign a contract. To be fair, I don’t know if I’d categorize this as Fitzgerald not being bold enough, but I sure would categorize it as a massive issue on his part. If the Devils could not acquire Hughes in part because Fitzgerald just really needed to give some form of no-movement clauses to players like Johnny Kovacevic and Ondrej Palat, then that is a catastrophic failure and maybe even grounds for job termination. I don’t understand why he feels the need to continue doing this, but regardless of his reasons, it’s come back to haunt him in a big way. Maybe if Fitzgerald was a little more bold in negotiations, he could have convinced these middle-tier players to sign without significant no-move protections. But hey, what do I know?
Final Thoughts
Whether you agree or disagree with any of the points I’ve made today, I want you to know that I’m trying my very best to be fair here. The vultures are circling around Fitzgerald, with his job security seemingly in the balance more than ever before. I wanted to take a look at a couple of major reasons why this team is struggling lately, and why I think it’s unfair to blame Fitzgerald for one of them, but completely fair to blame him for the other.
In my opinion, the biggest flaw Fitzgerald has as a general manager right now is his unwillingness to think outside the box and/or take bold action. Risk-taking has been rewarded time and again since the pandemic, though as mentioned, it also takes a fair bit of luck. Fitzgerald really, REALLY needs to start going against the crowd and make some moves that most wouldn’t. That of course does not mean he should make moves just for the sake of making moves, they need to be transactions that he truly believes will help the team. And he also really needs to avoid overcorrecting and doing things like, for example, trading three first round picks and Simon Nemec for Steven Stamkos. But I really don’t think it’s too much to ask for Fitzgerald to be smart about this.
At the end of the day, I am willing to give Fitzgerald more time. He’s made some genuinely great moves in his time running the show here, and as I said earlier, I do think he had a strong offseason. But the clock is ticking. To Tom Fitzgerald, I would say please be bolder. And to Devils ownership, I would say please bring someone in who is willing to be bold and creative if Fitzgerald can’t cut it.
