It’s been a few days since the New Jersey Devils stunned the NHL world by trading for Connor Hellebuyck.
The trade officially came down on Friday afternoon. Hellebuyck was introduced to the local media prior to Saturday’s game vs. the Los Angeles Kings, following Sunny Mehta’s press conference explaining his rationale behind the deal.
Life gets in the way sometimes, so I didn’t get much of a chance to go through the media availabilities when they happened on Saturday. But I did think there was a lot
of stuff in there that was noteworthy and worth discussing, especially when we’re talking big picture stuff with the Devils moving forward. I also think now that I’ve a few days to process this trade from a mental standpoint, I had some additional thoughts I wanted to get out there.
Sunny Mehta Putting His Stamp on This Team
In the short time that Mehta has been on the job, he has put his stamp on this team.
Remember, it wasn’t too long ago that the Devils fired former GM Tom Fitzgerald. April 6th, to be exact. Fast forward almost seven months later and not only is the roster dramatically different….it’s significantly better.
Look no further than the box score from the day after the team fired Fitzgerald, a 5-1 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers.
The Devils starting goaltender that night was Jacob Markstrom. He’s no longer in the organization. Neither are a handful of the skaters who dressed that night, a list that includes Nick Bjugstad and Dawson Mercer (part of the Connor Hellebuyck trade), Paul Cotter (not qualified), Brian Halonen (left as a UFA), and Simon Nemec (traded to Calgary). I didn’t even mention Nico Daws (who was also part of the Hellebuyck trade), or Maxim Tsyplakov (who was also part of the Nemec trade), nor did I mention other players who are now in the minors like Lenni Hameenaho and Marc McLaughlin. Nor did I mention other free agents who departed like Evgenii Dadonov and Dennis Cholowski. This is also not including Ondrej Palat, who Fitzgerald managed to move several months before he was dismissed but entirely too late to do a whole lot else positive for the Devils.
Mehta inherited a mess of a roster, rolled up his sleeves, and hit the ground running once he was hired.
It started with the aforementioned Nemec and Tsyplakov trade and turning the former #2 overall pick into draft capital rather than saddling the roster with another potentially bad contract. That move paid immediate dividends as one of the firsts the Devils got in return for Nemec turned into Luke Evangelista. Add in the Markstrom trade that returned Evan Rodrigues and Jesper Boqvist. Add in a couple of 4th round pick trades for dart throws in Amadeus Lombardi and Declan Chisholm. Add in a sensible contract to Anthony Mantha a couple of weeks into free agency.
And now, the Hellebuyck trade.
I get that its early in the new season. I get that we’re still in the honeymoon phase. As Sunny himself said, there’s nothing to congratulate him over yet….they have to go out there and win. But it’s tough not to look at this roster when compared to the one from this past April and be excited about the direction of the team. For as dire as things looked as recently as this past spring, its a night and day difference. And that all has to do with the man sitting in the big chair.
I don’t want to keep harping on the poor job Fitzgerald did. There’s plenty that we don’t know about when it comes to doing due diligence around the league and being on top of the market.
That said, its tough not to compare Mehta and what he’s doing versus Fitzgerald dropping the ball last year when he couldn’t connect on maybe the biggest layup of all time when the Quinn Hughes situation practically fell into his lap.
Mehta had the pieces Winnipeg was looking for in a trade, including a recent high draft pick at a premium position in Alexander Command. He had just enough cap flexibility where he was able to get a deal done on the spot when the time came. The same couldn’t be said about Fitzgerald a year earlier when Vancouver came calling looking to move Quinn. New Jersey’s trade assets were less attractive than Minnesota’s thanks to years of poor drafting, and there was no cap flexibility to make that move for Quinn without getting creative.
In other words, Mehta had all of his ducks in a row when the time was right. His predecessor did not.
For that reason alone, I’m encouraged about the direction of the team going forward.
Being Aggressive And Having A Sense of Urgency
The old “200 Hockey Man” trope with incoming general managers is that they need time when they’re coming in and taking over a new team. They need to get a lay of the land and figure out what they have, and all of that just takes time.
Or you can do what Sunny Mehta has done in six months on the job. Clear out most of the riff raff from the previous regime, recognize that you can’t continue to throw away seasons when your best players are in their prime, and act accordingly. And he did just that with all of the aforementioned moves I just discussed the last few months.
Not bad for a first time GM.
Not bad in a league where we’re told all the time as fans that “trading is hard”. “You see, you can’t possibly fix bad goaltending overnight.” “It takes two to trade”.
We’ve heard those excuses a lot over the years when the previous regime did a whole lot of nothing when a season would circle the drain. And yet, months into the job, Sunny Mehta is operating like you or I would running a fantasy league.
Dare I say, Sunny Mehta is operating with a sense of urgency and aggressiveness that we usually only see from teams like the Vegas Golden Knights? Where the GM is being aggressive to make moves to try to win now? Where instead of being reactive, he’s being proactive?
Where “good enough” isn’t actually good enough?
Where, as Sunny has repeatedly said, every move is about trying to make the Devils better?
Those aren’t just coach-speak where it goes in one ear and out the other. He means what he says.
Nothing is guaranteed in life other than death and taxes. Just because the Devils have Jack Hughes under contract for three more seasons after this one doesn’t necessarily mean he’s content with the organizational incompetence over the years that has prevented the Devils from taking that next step.
Like it or not, this is the player empowerment era. If you’re not all-in to try to win right now, you don’t want to be the next team that feels forced to trade away a Connor Hellebuyck or Dylan Larkin with years left on their contract because they know they’re not going to win in their present-day situation.
Jack Hughes is 25. Luke Hughes is 23, Jesper Bratt is 28. Nico Hischier is 27. Luke Evangelista is 24. Arseny Gritsyuk is 25. The Devils best players are in place right now. They’re in their prime now. The time to be pushing the chips in and going for it isn’t two years from now or three years from now when MAYBE teams like Florida and/or Carolina are starting to age out of their competitive window. It’s not four years from now when all of those prospects you happen to like from the most recent drafts are just now getting their first taste of NHL action. It’s now, as in right now. As in, today. Not tomorrow. Otherwise, what’s the point of even doing this?
It might not work. It might turn out that an all-in version of the Devils still isn’t good enough. But it’s a better approach than being overly patient and hoping things fix themselves if they go wrong in the middle of the season.
This Brings Us To The Hellebuyck Trade
I thought the most interesting answer during Mehta’s press conference was to Keith Kavanaugh’s question about trying to predict what Hellebuyck’s future production will be as he continues to get older.
Whenever the Connor Hellebuyck topic has come up on these forums, the people who have generally been against the idea of acquiring him have taken that stance due to some combination of his age, contract term, cap hit, and last year’s performance.
I’m not telling people that they’re wrong to think that way, as I think those are the risks associated with making this particular deal. Which is why I found Mehta’s comments interesting.
I don’t think I’m revealing anything earth-shattering when I say that Sunny Mehta is smarter than I am. He’s talking at his press conference about the Bayesian Heirarchal Model he built SIXTEEN YEARS AGO on talent distribution amongst goaltenders. I don’t know what a Bayesian Heirarchal Model is even after Googling it, and even if Mehta personally tried to explain it to me like I’m five, I still don’t think I’d get it.
What I do know is that I’m capable of recognizing when people are smarter than me. And if someone who has built models, done the homework, and has access to all sorts of stats that aren’t public is still interested in this particular player, that’s good enough for me. I don’t think Mehta is stubborn to the point where he’d ignore obvious red flags like, say, when the Devils signed Ondrej Palat as a UFA. I think he has access to all sorts of information that we don’t. He alluded to this when he specifically cited the Islanders loss where the public metrics suggested they played well but their own internal metrics (never mind the eye test….they did lose the game 6-0) suggested the opposite. In his short time on the job, Mehta has earned the benefit of the doubt that he knows what he’s doing.
That’s not saying that we should ignore the volatility with the goaltending position. But at the end of the day, you gotta pick one of the horses from the stable to ride if you hope to get anywhere. Aren’t you better off picking one who has consistently been one of the best in the league like Hellebuyck? As Sunny Mehta put it, wouldn’t you bet on a person with a large sample size of excellent results and on a good cap hit?
Isn’t that far less risky than trying to get elite results from replacement level options?
I suppose if one wanted to be cynical and suggest that Mehta’s process is flawed, they could argue that. But that argument falls apart quickly when you see how badly Carolina also wanted Hellebuyck.
What does it say about Hellebuyck that Eric Tulsky, who literally just won a Stanley Cup with Brandon Bussi off of waivers, wanted Hellebuyck badly enough that he was looking to find forwards to flip to Winnipeg to acquire him? What does it say about Hellebuyck that perhaps the two smartest, most analytically-driven general managers, wanted to acquire him despite everything we talked about?
It probably means Hellebuyck is worth acquiring, even with the known risks associated with him.
Goaltending is random enough where yes, if you have the right infrastructure in place, you could potentially win a Cup with Brandon Bussi. Bussi has also been awful in the early portion of this season. Expecting to get the Stanley Cup level of performance again from Bussi isn’t a smart bet. Tulsky likely recognized the same thing Mehta did pertaining to Hellebuyck which explains why he was in on that conversation.
This Is Not The Same Thing As The Markstrom Trade
I get that a lot of Devils fans have goaltending related PTSD. I get that there have been comparisons to Jacob Markstrom, another older goaltender brought in via trade not too long ago, and drawing conclusions that because it didn’t work with Markstrom, it won’t work with Hellebuyck either.
The problem with that line of thinking is multifold. Markstrom was older than Hellebuyck is now when the Devils acquired them. Markstrom had far more volatility year to year with his actual on-ice results than Hellebuyck, who really just had the one down year last year. Hellebuyck has always been a higher floor and higher ceiling goaltender, year-to-year, than Markstrom. Markstrom’s tendency to let in soft, low-danger goals also can’t be ignored. That has not been an issue with Hellebuyck historically.
But I think you could also argue Hellebuyck’s game is more likely to age well than Markstrom’s game ever was. His game is based more on technique and fundamentals than pure athleticism. We saw signs of Markstrom’s game physically declining. Slower reflexes. An unreliable glove. Flailing to make a save but just can’t get there.
I’m not saying Hellebuyck won’t have a physical decline at some point. He is under contract until he’s 37 years old. But like I said in my article recapping the trade, I’ll worry about what Hellebuyck is in 2030-31 when we get there. I’m more concerned about the here and now and it’s tough to argue that the Devils aren’t better now than they were a week ago because of this deal.
Wait, Hellebuyck Has a Good Contract?
According to Sunny Mehta, the answer to that question is yes.
He didn’t misspeak either. He doubled down on it when he talked to Bryce Salvador and Rachel Herzog on the pregame show.
I’m sure a big part of the reason why he feels that way is that the salary cap ceiling is projected to hit $127.5M by 2028-29. Mehta recognizes that Hellebuyck will be going from taking up roughly 8.1% of the cap to 6.66% in two years. But he also recognizes that contracts signed from this day forward are only going to get bigger and bigger moving forward as the cap continues to explode.
To that point, the Devils have Jack Hughes under contract through 2030. Jesper Bratt, Timo Meier and Hellebuyck are signed through 2031. Nico Hischier, Luke Evangelista, and Luke Hughes are signed through 2032. Arseny Gritsyuk, Jonas Siegenthaler, and Connor Brown are on fair to below market value deals. Almost all of those deals were signed prior to this season.
At the end of the day, there’s only so much pie to go around to everyone on the 23-man roster. All of those players are getting a healthy-sized slice. But with the pie getting bigger and bigger and those numbers locked in, there’s value to be had where all of a sudden you can squeeze in another mid-sized contract if the rest of your books are in order. Perhaps even another for US Men’s Hockey Team player. Maybe even that other one.
Hellebuyck Should Give the Devils Peace of Mind
We can talk about analytics and advanced stats until the cows come home. At the end of the day, hockey is an emotional game played by human beings, and not everything can be quantified on a spreadsheet.
Hellebuyck himself talked about the importance of doing his part, saying “they need to know that there’s a rock back there to stop any mistakes that might happen.”
We talked about this a few weeks ago when I brought up how “1-0, them” had become a problem. There’s nothing more deflating to a hockey team that is controlling the pace of play, outshooting the other team by a 3:1 margin or whatever it is, but one defensive breakdown leads to “1-0, them”. That goes double when you’ve had a goaltender like Markstrom in the past where the goal scored against you is usually Charmin soft.
Mistakes will happen, and I need to see more than a couple game sample size against Anaheim and Los Angeles before I can say the Devils have a shutdown defense. But what we have seen with how this team has shown they’re capable of defending is promising.
This is where adding a goaltender with “best in the world” upside raises both the floor and ceiling of what this team could be. At a bare minimum, Hellebuyck should be an upgrade over what the Devils have been rolling out there. But what if it turns out that last year was just a blip where he was injured and playing on a Jets team that stunk defensively and THAT’S why his numbers dipped?
My level of expectations has been lowered enough to the point where I’m not asking for the guy that was a three-time Vezina winner and former Hart Trophy winner. But now that we have that guy, can I ask “what if” we ever got that level of performance between the pipes and the difference it would make?
So…..What’s Next?
That’s why we play the games at the end of the day.
Vibes are good right now after the Devils took care of business at home last week against Colorado, Anaheim, and Los Angeles. Between that and the Hellebuyck trade, some would say the vibes are indeed immaculate.
That said, the immediate schedule is still difficult with road games in Colorado and Vegas this week. Edmonton comes to Newark next week. The Devils have a bunch of tricky spot games in the next few weeks, including a home-and-home against a tough Washington team. And if how Brady Tkachuk and Quinn Hughes were received in their returns to Ottawa and Vancouver, respectively, are any indication, the Devils get to experience that shortly as Connor Hellebuyck visits Winnipeg on November 10th.
The schedule is what it is though. You play the teams when they tell you to. You might need to win in a variety of manners….winning a track meet, playing shutdown defense, or perhaps those nights where your goaltender needs to be your best player. As Sunny said, it’s all about giving yourself more outs to potentially hit to be successful.
Let’s see how the team navigates this stretch.
