Before I get into it, let me just say right off the top that I am not absolving others of blame for this New Jersey Devils season spiraling into despair. The general manager, Tom Fitzgerald, deserves an enormous
amount of blame and should have been relieved of his duties a long time ago. The players deserve tons of blame for performing so woefully to this point. The ownership group deserves massive blame for leading this disaster and letting their franchise (and their arena, by the way) fall into disrepair. Everyone is to blame, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I write about the shortcomings of any of the people I just mentioned at some point down the road.
But for today, let’s just focus on the head coach.
Sheldon Keefe came to New Jersey with a pretty impressive track record. He had never missed the playoffs in any year of his professional coaching career, whether that be with the AHL Toronto Marlies or the NHL Toronto Maple Leafs. Barring an act of providence, that streak will end in approximately two months. He also led the Maple Leafs to their first playoff series victory in a couple of decades, which was a major feat for that cursed franchise. He took superstars like Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner to another level defensively, while not completely neutering them offensively.
When Keefe was hired by Tom Fitzgerald to be the new Devils bench boss in 2024, it was mostly lauded as a solid move. Maybe not a home run hire, but a well-struck double up the alley. And for about three months in 2024, it looked like the absolute right hire. The common complaints about the Devils under former coach Lindy Ruff was that the team was a mess defensively and that they were too reliant on rush-based offense. Keefe came in and drilled an emphasis on defense into his players. This peaked in mid-December, when the Devils went seven straight games without allowing more than 20 shots. They weren’t producing tons of offense during this time, but they didn’t need to with such incredible defensive play. Meanwhile the rush-based attack morphed into an offense more focused on slowing things down. Less rush, more cycle. Fewer controlled zone entries, more dump and chases. Again, the offense wasn’t a top unit, but it got the job done.
But once teams got a couple months of tape on the Devils, they figured out how to counter what they were doing. The winning stopped almost immediately after Christmas of 2024, and the number one reason for this was the offense. When diagnosing the problem, it can be hard to know how much is players underperforming and how much is coaches putting them in positions to fail. But while I do think a lot of New Jersey’s offensive struggles in the second half of 2024-25 can be attributed to the roster’s lack of talent, I think a lot of it came back to Keefe’s system.
The core of the team was built to play in a system that emphasizes their speed, skill, and offensive creativity. It’s no coincidence that players like Jack Hughes, Jesper Bratt, Nico Hischier, and Dougie Hamilton had the best seasons of their careers playing in Ruff’s high-octane scheme. I’m not here to tell you that Ruff’s system was actually right all along and Fitzgerald never should have fired him. Believe me, I do think it was Ruff’s time to go. But I will say that for all his flaws, he did develop a system that complimented the strengths of both his best players and the roster as a whole. The Devils were building Avalanche East, a team that would win games by overwhelming opponents with speed and skill, constantly applying pressure by turning defense into offense in the blink of an eye. In a way, it’s not totally dissimilar to what the Florida Panthers and Carolina Hurricanes do. Both those teams play a system that emphasizes aggression and applies pressure, mostly in the form of relentless forechecking. The Devils played aggressively and applied pressure through a swarming defensive zone concept combined with a rush-oriented offense. Again, it had it’s flaws. But the important thing was that when it worked, it fit the roster like a glove.
I don’t doubt that there are teams out there that Sheldon Keefe would fit extremely well. But the Devils, sadly, are not one of them. I give credit to Keefe for getting this team to play better defense, but it has come at too high a cost on offense. One of the defining traits of the Keefe system is a concept called “fight the panic”. This is a philosophy for breaking pucks out of the defensive zone, where players are taught to take extremely safe routes out of the zone, and if there is even a little danger ahead, they should circle back and wait for a better opportunity. Hence, fight the panic. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with this, but I really do think it’s an ill-fitting system for this team. The Devils thrived on stretch passes and rush offense before Keefe arrived, and Keefe took that huge strength away. Again, this is where it becomes hard to separate blame properly, as the counterargument to this would be that the team no longer had the puck-movers on the backend to properly execute a stretch-pass and rush-based attack, meaning Keefe was wise to alter the club’s tactics. I think there’s merit to that. Damon Severson and John Marino (and Ryan Graves to a lesser degree) were quite good at moving the puck, and their replacements, a combo of Johnny Kovacevic, Brenden Dillon, and Brett Pesce, were far inferior in this regard.
But if the point of sacrificing a little offense was to create a stellar defense, that only worked for a few months. From Christmas until the end of the season in 2024-25, the Devils were still good defensively, but nowhere close to the heights they achieved pre-Christmas. This made their offensive struggles that much more of a problem, and they barely squeaked into the postseason as a result.
And then came this season, in which the Devils have been even worse offensively, and don’t even have a top defense to show for it anymore.
This is where Keefe has completely lost me. As much as I have complained about Fitzgerald’s roster management, I will give him credit for recognizing that he went a little too far with the whole “grit and toughness” thing. Over the summer, he brought in more speed and skill, in the form of Connor Brown, Evgenii Dadonov, Arseny Gritsyuk, and Cody Glass as a re-signing. The only one of those that hasn’t worked out is Dadonov, but I don’t fault Fitzgerald that much for it. Dadonov played well for the Dallas Stars a season ago, he came very cheap, and it would’ve been unreasonable to expect his play to fall off as much as it has. In any case, Fitzgerald course-corrected a little bit, and yet the offense is as bad as ever. Yes that’s on Fitzgerald, but that’s also on Keefe. He got an upgraded forward corps and still couldn’t improve or adjust. Remember when I said he got top-level defense out of Matthews and Marner in Toronto without completely neutering them offensively? Well for whatever reason, he has been completely unable to do that with this group’s top guys. Ever since Keefe started calling the shots, Hughes, Hischier, and Bratt have all seen their production drop significantly:
Actually, it hasn’t just been the top guys. Keefe hasn’t been able to squeeze one ounce of offense out of anyone on this roster. In his end of season press conference last spring, when asked about why the team struggled offensively so much after Christmas, Keefe said he was unsure and that it was going to be a big project for him over the summer. Well clearly this project of his was an utter failure.
Recently, the Devils lost 3-0 to the Columbus Blue Jackets. It was a loss that, effectively, ended their season. Aside from the result, something else that really bothered me was Keefe’s response after the game. He basically laid all the blame on his players, going out of his way to make the case that he wasn’t the problem, and that it was everyone else around him:
Now look, I don’t necessarily have a problem with coaches being hard on their players and calling them out in public. As a matter of fact, I think that can be a great weapon for a coach to use when implemented properly. But to shirk accountability for yourself is completely unacceptable. And no, I don’t count his throwaway line of “That’s on me to get them going” as sufficiently taking accountability.
As mentioned before, Keefe came to New Jersey with a solid resume. But that’s it, only solid. He hasn’t experienced major success as a coach, and he certainly never did as a player. When Larry Robinson famously threw a trash can in the locker room and publicly ripped his team to shreds during the 2000 Eastern Conference Final, he had the clout to do that because he was a Hall of Fame player and an accomplished assistant coach with Stanley Cup rings coming out of his ears. And guess what…it worked. The Devils erased a 3-1 series deficit to defeat the Philadelphia Flyers in seven games. They would go on to win the Cup a couple weeks later. When Larry Robinson rips his team, players listen because Robinson is accomplished enough to do that, and because the team was good enough to make it to the Eastern Conference Final, so clearly something was working up to that point. When Keefe does it, it rings so hollow because he hasn’t accomplished anything of significance in his coaching career, and because he’s doing it while his team languishes near the bottom of the league. If his only answer is the blame his players and say that his system is fine, then he’s arrogant and delusional and he needs to go.
So in the end, while Keefe might be a fit for some teams, he was not a fit for this one. I will admit that I liked the hire at the time, though Keefe wasn’t my first choice. No, my top guy was former Edmonton Oilers coach Jay Woodcroft, who was fired early in the 2024-25 campaign by Edmonton and was available at the time. I still wouldn’t mind Woodcroft being brought on this offseason after Keefe (presumably) gets his pink slip, as I think Woodcroft did good work with a similar roster in Edmonton, albeit a much more talented one at the very top. But either way, while I wanted Woodcroft, I was fine with Keefe, and I have to admit I was wrong. Keefe was not the guy. And I think the lesson here is to hire a coach who is willing and able to adapt his systems and philosophies to the roster he has, instead of trying to shoehorn his roster into whatever system he stubbornly wants to run.
What do you all think of Sheldon Keefe? Do you agree that he was simply not the right coach for this team? Do you disagree and instead put the blame on the front office and/or players? Assuming Keefe is not the head coach next season, who do you want the Devils to bring in to replace him? As always, thanks for reading.
