Welcome friends to another year of All About The Jersey season previews. This will be a multi-part series where the team here at AATJ will run through key areas of the team such as defensemen, forwards,
special teams, and so on. If you can believe it, the long offseason is drawing to a close and the return of honest to goodness regular season hockey will be here before we know it. It will be good to have real Devils hockey back.
For the 2025-26 season, we will kick things off with a look at the New Jersey Devils defense corps. What additions and subtractions did the unit experience over the offseason? How did New Jersey defensemen perform last season? How might the defensemen be paired together? We’ll get into all of that today.
Enough preamble. Let’s begin.
Additions and Subtractions
We start with arguably the most boring part of this preview, because quite frankly…this is almost the exact same group as last season.
There will still be at least some level of change, though. The biggest one is probably Johnny Kovacevic missing significant time to begin the season. We still don’t know exactly how long he will be out because you’d have a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa than getting injury information out of this franchise, but at the very least it seems like it will be more a matter of months, not days or weeks. His most logical replacement will be Simon Nemec, who of course is a familiar face around here. If not him, then Seamus Casey would most likely be the next man up.
There is also Brian Dumoulin, who came over at the trade deadline as the Devils were enduring some injuries to their blueline. He played roughly to his expected level during the regular season, but really stepped up in the postseason, where he was the only starting-caliber defenseman who was fully healthy by the end of the Devils’ first round series against Carolina. Dumoulin logged some huge minutes against the Hurricanes, and while he wasn’t flashy, he got the job done. Following the season, he hit unrestricted free agency, where he signed with the Los Angeles Kings on a three-year, $12m deal.
We do also have to talk about Luke Hughes though. At the time of this writing, Hughes is still unemployed. Over the summer, general manager Tom Fitzgerald said that once Independence Day came and went, his number one offseason priority would be hammering out a deal with the youngest Hughes brother. Fast forward almost three months, and still nothing. I think it’s safe to say that Devils fans are starting to get fed up. As Chris said this weekend, enough is enough.
All that being said though, I still believe that Luke Hughes will make a deal with the Devil(s) before the season begins. Call it blind faith if you wish, but I just don’t see the two sides dragging this out to the point where actually missing game action is in play. We just saw how quickly these things can move with the Anaheim Ducks and RFA Mason McTavish. On Saturday morning, the two sides appeared far apart…and then mere hours later, they agreed to a long-term deal. NHL insiders, ladies and gentlemen!
Anyway, aside from Kovacevic missing time and Dumoulin departing after his handful of games, it’s a pretty status quo blueline in New Jersey. Dougie Hamilton, Jonas Siegenthaler, Brett Pesce, and Brenden Dillon are all still here after playing (mostly) full seasons in 2024-25. Simon Nemec is expected to be the Kovacevic replacement, and Seamus Casey and Dennis Cholowski are expected to be the depth. Despite the post-Christmas struggles this team endured, the defense mostly did their job in 2024-25 (more on that below), so I don’t consider it a bad thing that basically the entire blueline is back.
As far as additions go, New Jersey did sign Calen Addison to a minimum contract in the offseason. I would not be surprised if we saw him get a handful of games in the NHL as an injury replacement for a few games, but if Addison is getting regular playing time, it’s probably safe to say something went horribly wrong. It’s not that Addison is a complete stiff, as he’s had some measure of success at the NHL level before. But he’s certainly not one of the six or seven best defensemen in the organization, so I would hope he gets most of his playing time in Utica this season.
There’s also Ethan Edwards, who has looked pretty good in preseason action thus far. The University of Michigan product signed his Entry Level Contract when his college season ended back in March. He got into 10 AHL games after his days as a Wolverine were over, collecting three assists in those contests. Edwards is like Addison to me in that he may have some potential, but I hope we don’t see a lot of him in 2025-26, because that would mean something went wrong somewhere.
How Did The Defense Perform In 2024-25?
So if basically the entire blueline is back from last season, the follow-up question that needs to be asked is this:
How did that blueline perform last season?
Well when it came to their primary job of playing defense, they were actually pretty great. According to Natural Stat Trick, New Jersey was near the top of the league in some key defensive stats last season (all stats 5-on-5):
Corsi Against per 60: 55.86 (7th-best in the NHL)
Shots Against per 60: 25.56 (7th)
Scoring Chances Against per 60: 24.68 (8th)
High Danger Corsi For per 60: 10.1 (10th)
Expected Goals Against per 60: 2.38 (10th)
Actual Goals Against per 60: 2.27 (11th)
Now granted, those are team-wide stats and not just for the defensemen on the roster. But the fact remains that New Jersey played some darn good defense in 2025-26 and the actual defensemen deserve most of the credit for that.
Digging a little deeper, it was clear that Sheldon Keefe unearthed a true gem of a shutdown pair in Jonas Siegenthaler and Johnny Kovacevic. They played 750 5-on-5 minutes together (748 actually, but who’s counting), and in that time they absolutely suffocated opponents. According to MoneyPuck, among defense pairings with at least 450 minutes of time together, Siegenthaler-Kovacevic posted the best xGA/60 in the league (1.82). As we mentioned already, Kovacevic will miss a decent chunk of time, so that pairing won’t be reunited to start the campaign. But after a down 2023-24, Siegenthaler returned to being an elite shutdown defenseman. Even if he doesn’t have Kovacevic with him, I’m fairly confident Siegenthaler will continue to put up strong defensive numbers.
The one knock on that pairing was that they did not bring much offense to the table. When they were on the ice, Siegenthaler-Kovacevic made sure that absolutely nothing happened, which made for quite the juxtaposition to the Dougie Hamilton-Brenden Dillon pairing. While Siegenthaler-Kovacevic was low-event, Hamilton-Dillon was incredibly high-event. Again according to MoneyPuck, among defense pairings with 450 minutes at 5-on-5 together, Hamilton-Dillon posted the sixth-best xGF/60 rate (3.18) in the NHL. For comparison, Siegenthaler-Kovacevic were at 2.47 xGF/60. And it’s a good thing Hamilton and Dillon brought the offense because they also allowed 2.76 xGA/60 together, almost a full goal higher than Siegenthaler and Kovacevic. So Hamilton and Dillon did win their minutes, just like Siegenthaler and Kovacevic did, but they did so in a completely different way.
Meanwhile, in the middle of those two pairings’ Yin and Yang, the defense combo that actually saw the most 5-on-5 time together was Luke Hughes and Brett Pesce. The young gun and the steady veteran spent 943 minutes together in 2024-25, largely winning their minutes every night while not being truly elite at either offense or defense. This time we’ll use NST (again, all stats 5-on-5):
CF%: 52.96%
SCF%: 55.74%
HDCF: 53.13%
xGF%: 52.65%
Not world-beating numbers, but when Hughes-Pesce was on the ice, the puck was generally in the opponent’s zone.
As far as the others go, it’s a little hard to extrapolate too much from Casey’s and Cholowski’s numbers since they had such small sample sizes, but we certainly can for Nemec. I did a bit of a deeper dive into Nemec over the summer, so if you want a more granular breakdown of his 2024-25 then you can check that out. The short version is that he was hurt the entire year, it hampered his game, he put up atrocious numbers both in terms of underlying metrics and raw production, and he made up for a lot of that with a very strong finish to the year in the playoffs. The Devils certainly have to hope that how he ended the season is indicative of how he’s going to play now that he will most likely soak up Kovacevic’s minutes as he recovers from his injury.
So as we can see, the defense put up some pretty good metrics last season. The problem was, while the underlying numbers were good to great, the point production was mediocre. Hughes led the blueline with 44 points (seven goals, 37 assists). 44 points is a perfectly respectable number, especially for a very young player in only his second full season, but for the Devils to be true Cup contenders, they need their top-scoring defenseman to post more than that. They need something more like Hamilton’s 2022-23, when he put up 22 goals and 74 points. Speaking of Hamilton, in his first year back after suffering a torn pectoral that cost him about 75% of his 2023-24 campaign, he came back and registered nine goals and 40 points. That’s a down year for Hamilton, but to be fair, he did miss 18 games due to injury (which is another problem). If he played a full slate, he most likely would have surpassed Hughes, but he still did not approach his 2022-23 numbers.
Hughes and Hamilton are the offensive dynamos of the back end, they need to produce points because the rest of the defense corps will almost certainly not. Here are the rest of the team’s numbers from last season:
Pesce: three goals, 17 points
Kovacevic: one goal, 17 points
Dillon: two goals, 16 points
Siegenthaler: two goals, nine points
Cholowski was held pointless in six games, and while Casey did post four goals and eight points in 14 games, he will absolutely not put up a shooting percentage of 33% again.
The defense played good defense, but there is more to defense than defense. New Jersey will need more production out of their blueline this season if they want to take the next step toward competing for a title.
Projecting The Pairs
This would have been an easy exercise if Kovacevic was healthy. If he was, I think we would almost certainly see the same pairings we saw for the vast majority of last season. Instead, we have to see how the pieces fit together without him.
Throughout training camp and the preseason, head coach Sheldon Keefe has reunited Siegenthaler and Hamilton quite a bit, at least based on Amanda Stein’s reports on lineups in practices and preseason games over on her Twitter feed. Meanwhile, Nemec has skated with Dillon in multiple preseason games and practices as well. Obviously Hughes can’t participate since he’s still an RFA, but I think considering him and Pesce got the most 5-on-5 time of any pairing last season, that’s a combo that Keefe will want to keep together.
So based on those context clues, here’s how I see the defense corps shaking out come regular season time:
Hughes-Pesce
Siegenthaler-Hamilton
Dillon-Nemec
Extra: Chowlowski
Again, this assumes a Hughes contract actually gets done before opening day. If it doesn’t I don’t know what’s going to happen. And I’m also penciling Cholowski in as the seventh defenseman here because I think general manager Tom Fitzgerald and the rest of the Devils braintrust will want players like Casey and Edwards to get ample playing time at the AHL level to start the season. So it was between Cholowski and Addison for the seventh spot with the big club, and I think the Devils coaching and front office like Cholowski more, so he gets the nod.
Final Thoughts And Your Take
As disappointing as the Devils season was a year ago, the defense mostly held up their end of the bargain. They regressed post-Christmas just like every other part of the team, but it’s probably the one unit that regressed the least. Aside from Kovacevic, which is certainly a significant blow, New Jersey enters the season with a healthy defense corps after injuries completely decimated the blueline in the second half and especially in the postseason. I am excited to see Hamilton, Siegenthaler, and Dillon back to full strength, Nemec actually enter a season healthy, and for Hughes to finally sign a contract. I am also excited to see what the younger players like Edwards and Casey can do, whether that be with the Devils or in AHL Utica.
Now that we’ve gone through a rundown on the defense corps, what do you make of this unit for 2025-26? When do you think we’ll see Kovacevic back? When do you think Hughes will sign his contract, and what will the terms be? Do you agree with the projected pairings I laid out above, and if not what would you prefer to see? As always, thanks for reading!
