Progress isn't always linear, as general manager Ray Shero emphasized earlier in this lost Devils season that concluded with Saturday's 4-3 overtime victory in Florida.
I think fans may have accepted a little step back from a wondrous 2017-18 campaign that saw the Devils break a five-year playoff drought, but the complete 180 from this team was a harder pill to swallow.
Two seasons ago, New Jersey managed just 70 points, a stinker the organization from top-down vowed never to repeat. This season, the Devils finished with 72 points (31-41-10).
Now, Shero and coach John Hynes will scream from Newark to Cape May that the two iterations are apples and oranges, that the earlier squad boasted nowhere near the battle level of the current crop. And it's also true that injuries, especially the knee issues that sidelined 2017-18 Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall for the final 47 games (49 in total), were crushing, forcing Hynes to roll out AHL-level lineups for most of the season's second half.
However, it would be incorrect to state that this season went off the rails when Hall went down. The Devils were 11-16-6 (.848 points percentage) when Hall played, 20-25-4 (.898) when he didn't.
Still, getting Hall's signature on a new contract is priority number one this summer, as I laid out in an earlier post. Hall has one more season left on his current deal, but Shero can ill afford to make the same mistakes the Islanders made with John Tavares a year ago. They need to either sign Hall or trade him.
Here are the Devils' other to-dos this offseason to get back on the right track:
1) Win The Lottery
This one admittedly is out of the Devils' hands, and I'd be fine if they landed one of the top two selections in the 2019 NHL Draft at the April 9 lottery. By beating Florida, New Jersey erased the possibility of dropping below Los Angeles as the league's second-worst team. Instead, the Devils have an 11.5% chance of landing the first overall pick (they defied measly 8.5% odds by jumping from fifth to first to select Nico Hischier two years ago), which most experts believe will be used on U.S. National Team Development Program center Jack Hughes.
However, Finnish wing Kaapo Kakko is said to be closing the gap on Hughes. I think the Devils, with an 11.3% chance of selecting second, might be better off with the six-foot-two, 194-pound Kakko over the diminutive Hughes. After Kyle Palmieri, and maybe Jesper Bratt if slotted on his off wing, the Devils aren't exactly brimming with talent over on the right. The excitement I feel for Nathan Bastian's three goals in seven games since his call-up from Binghamton is mostly manufactured. In any event, the consensus has been that Hughes and Kakko tower over the rest of the field in terms of both star potential and readiness for the NHL in 2019/2020. This team could really use another dose of lottery luck.
2) Hunt For A Big-Time Defenseman
And by big, I mean it literally. Prospects Ty Smith and Jeremy Davies are expected to join fellow sub-six-footers Andy Greene, Sami Vatanen, Will Butcher and Connor Carrick to compete for spots on the Devils' Lilliputian blue line next season. Those in New Jersey's defensive corps with size—Damon Severson, Mirco Mueller and Steven Santini—were often soft and inattentive to details in their own end this season, negating any physical advantages. The results were ghastly. The Devils surrendered the sixth-most goals (275) in the league. Not all of them can be blamed on the club's awful goaltending before MacKenzie Blackwood and a healthier Cory Schneider stabilized the position later in the season.
The Devils need a horse on defense more than anything, a player capable of eating massive ice time without wearing down like Greene, who turns 37 in October. Unfortunately, those types of players don't grow on trees. Like in 2017, the top defenseman in this draft, Bowen Byram, is projected to go outside the top two and may need further seasoning before providing help at the NHL level. He might even be a reach at No. 3, as the NHL Central Scouting Bureau's recent report rates several forwards ahead of him. Free agency has never been kind to New Jersey, so I'm not holding out hope for Erik Karlsson. Others, like Tyler Myers, could be good fits, but they're not top-pair guys. No, the Devils need Shero to pull a rabbit out of his hat in the trade market. He has some attractive assets, including this draft pick, to do just that. How about making another call to old pal David Poile in Nashville?
3) End Grade Inflation
The best news I heard from Hynes on Saturday was that he was going to have some "stern exit interviews" and take a hard look at his personnel. For if there was one proximate cause for this disaster of a season, it was the organization's tendency to overrate their own talent. Injuries aside, this team flat-out underperformed. Remember: Though the Devils lost a few periphery pieces (John Moore, Patrick Maroon, Michael Grabner) to free agency last summer, the only player in the opening night lineup who did not contribute to the prior season's success story was John Quenneville, a 2014 first-round pick. Patience is a virtue, but not all seeds bear delicious fruit. This team is chock full of players whom Hynes once called "just guys out there," not making any impact. They were unreliable and prone to mental mistakes that led to goals against. Severson recorded career-best offensive numbers (11-28-39), but how can anyone trust that he will eventually learn to stay on the right side of the puck in defensive zone coverage after five years of lapses? He's got four more seasons on his six-year, $25 million contract. Similarly, Pavel Zacha, a 2015 sixth-overall pick who was given (and then subsequently removed from) the second-line center role in each of the last two seasons, needed a late surge (6-8-14 in his last 18 games) to get to a merely subpar production level of 25 points in 61 games. Zacha is a pending restricted free agent. How do you evaluate him? On a curve because he just turned 22? Or are there signs (slow processing, inconsistent compete level, concussion history, etc.) that should give Shero pause?
If the Devils were owned by anyone other than Josh Harris and David Blitzer, who subjected 76ers fans to years of tanking teams as owners, I'd say that this is going to be an important summer for Shero. Somehow, though, I don't believe Shero feels any urgency to alter his course. Look, I don't fault the Devils' "process," for lack of a better word, but after getting a peek at a bunch of their prospects this season, I'm not sold that they're anywhere close to building a sustainable winner like they think they are, even if their players played hard until the end.
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