With the restricted free agents profiled for this upcoming offseason, its time to shift our attention to the unrestricted free agents.
The New Jersey Devils didn’t have a lot of pending UFAs to begin with going into the offseason. The fact that the two I’m going to write about this week are probably the two most notable is telling. But we’ll look at them anyways and see if an argument can be made in regards to bringing one, both, or neither back as the Devils look ahead to the 2026-27 season. And
if the Devils do bring either one back, what might their next deal look like?
Evgenii Dadonov
The Devils announced the signing of the 36-year old Evgenii Dadonov to a bonus laden one-year, $1M contract on July 1st of last year.
Chris did the writeup of the deal last year and liked the deal. I liked the deal as well, as I thought Dadonov could be a good source of secondary offense at a bargain rate. Judging from the comments section, most of you liked this deal initially as well. It was a low-risk, medium-reward type of signing by Tom Fitzgerald.
And then the season started.
Dadonov made his Devils debut on October 9th against Carolina, fractured his hand, and missed the next 17 games. He returned in the middle of November, played 4 more games before getting injured again against Detroit. He missed another 22 games before returning in the middle of January.
The good news is that Dadonov mostly remained healthy the rest of the way.
The bad news is that he didn’t do much of anything in any of the games he would play.
His January return coincided with the Devils run of offensive futility. Dadonov mostly played a third or fourth line role and was invisible in those games. From January 11th to February 5th, he had eight SHOTS ON GOAL in 12 games. He only had 20 SOG for the entire season. He failed to ATTEMPT two shots a game. For some context, he was just shy of three attempts per game the previous season in Dallas when he netted 20 goals.
After the Olympic break, Dadonov was mostly benched down the stretch as the Devils had close to their full compliment of healthy forwards. He cleared waivers around the time of the trade deadline, but remained with the team and was never actually assigned to Utica.
When a late season injury to Arseny Gritsyuk popped up, Dadonov found himself back in the lineup. Why did this matter? Because his contract had bonuses in it that paid him an extra $250,000 if he crossed certain games played thresholds. Dadonov was approaching one of those at 20 games. Chris wrote about this as it was happening.
With the Devils operating in LTIR throughout the entirety of the season, any bonuses achieved would be pushed to next season’s books. Did outgoing GM Tom Fitzgerald make the prudent decision to save the Devils $250,000 on next year’s books by literally playing anybody else other than Dadonov?
Of course not.
Dadonov would play in that 20th game. He earned the bonus that he and his agent was able to negotiate into his deal. Between that and Simon Nemec hitting three ‘A’ bonuses, the Devils have a bonus overage charge of $1.25M for next season. With a tight cap situation, every dollar matters and the Devils wasted a quarter of a million dollars on next year’s cap on a struggling, underperforming player who probably won’t be on next year’s team. It’s an inexcusably poor decision by the now former Devils general manager Tom Fitzgerald.
At least Dadonov scored a goal in that 20th game. On a related note, it was the only goal, and only point, he would register as a Devil. It’s about as garbage time as garbage time gets in a game they were already losing 5-1 to a Carolina team they never beat and under 30 seconds remaining on the clock, but it still counts. Dadonov would play four more meaningless games down the stretch, appearing in 24 games total.
Ultimately, we were all wrong about Dadonov. He didn’t provide any offense at all. The two injuries early in the season threw his campaign off the rails, and he was unable to do much of anything when he returned to get things back on track. Blame injuries if you want. Blame Father Time if you want. Blame his linemates, playing time, or situation if you want. I think they were probably all contributing factors to Dadonov’s poor season to some extent. But the bottom line is that Dadonov, a player expected to contribute secondary offense, contributed nothing.
I think Dadonov, assuming he attempts to continue his NHL playing career, will struggle to find anything more than a PTO this offseason. AFP Analytics doesn’t even have a contract projection for him, citing “insufficient data”. At his age though, and given how poorly this past season went, I would say there is plenty of sufficient data. The problem is that none of that is good and the best Dadonov could probably hope for is a 1-year, minimum salary type of deal.
I can’t say that a 1-year, minimum salary type of deal is a bad deal. It’s not too far off from what the Devils actually gave him for this past season. But I also can’t sit here and suggest the Devils bring Dadonov back given the body of work from him this past season. I would expect Sunny Mehta to move on, and at Dadonov’s age, the NHL portion of his playing career is probably over.
Zack MacEwen
Zack MacEwen was a late addition to the Devils roster. The veteran winger came over in a preseason trade from the Ottawa Senators in exchange for Kurtis MacDermid. MacEwen was subsequently waived and cleared, but was recalled a few days later.
That trade was worth it simply from the standpoint that MacDermid had two years remaining at $1.15M while MacEwen was an expiring contract on a veteran’s minimum salary. The Devils managed to shed a little bit of salary while also getting an unnecessary contract off of their books for next season. They got a similar-ish player back in MacEwen who is also a big body and face puncher, but I’d argue that MacEwen did more things that resembled playing the game of hockey when you compare the two players on the ice. MacEwen skated hard and played the type of hard-nosed game you want to see from a fourth liner.
Unfortunately, we just didn’t get to see much of MacEwen as a Devil.
MacEwen drew in for the second game of the season, but got injured against the Tampa Bay Lightning. He returned a month later and appeared in two more games before leaving early in the second game in Chicago. The Devils would later announce that he underwent surgery to repair his ACL and that he would be out for the remainder of the season. Sheldon Keefe mentioned that MacEwen should be healthy enough to return for training camp in September 2026, but with him being an unrestricted free agent, its far from a guarantee he’s back in New Jersey.
AFP Analytics did project MacEwen for a 1-year, $850,000 deal, which sounds right for what is essentially a 13th or 14th forward on your roster.
I think MacEwen left a positive impression in his brief time as a Devil, but I don’t see the need to rush to bring back a depth forward coming off of a major knee injury. We saw how much Jonathan Kovacevic was hampered as he worked his way back from a major knee injury and it wasn’t pretty. Just because it happened to Kovacevic doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen to MacEwen, but it is something to keep in mind as MacEwen works his way back.
I can appreciate that MacEwen is a “tough to play against” type of player that the Devils, generally speaking, could use more of. I also look at the UFA market and see a bunch of those types, none of which are coming off of a knee injury. Heck, Sunny Mehta has ties to some of those guys whether its a Ryan Lomberg, Kevin Stenlund, Nick Cousins, AJ Greer, or Luke Kunin. All of those players have been on Florida’s fourth line at some point in the last few years while Mehta was their AGM.
I think its more likely Mehta either picks one of them with good underlying numbers and brings them aboard, or he finds the next one rather than keeping MacEwen.
