The New Jersey Devils have found their top-6 forward in Tomas Tatar

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The New Jersey Devils made another big free agency splash on Wednesday afternoon, signing winger Tomas Tatar to a two-year contract worth $4.5 million per season.

I shared my initial thoughts in a rapid reaction post just after the news broke. Today, I’m going to dig a little deeper.

• Tomas Tatar is a very consistent point producer. As I’ve mentioned a few times in this space, he’s averaged 60 points per 82 games over the last three seasons. A lot of that stems from his ability to generate offense at 5v5. Tatar has 108 points in that gamestate over the last three seasons, which is good for 22nd in the NHL. 22nd! He is sandwiched between Alex Ovechkin (110) and Sean Couturier (107). Seems pretty good.

  

• Believe it or not, Tatar looks (slightly) better when looking at efficiency rather than raw outputs. He slots 19th in points/60, ahead of names like Patrice Bergeron, Sasha Barkov, Mathew Barzal, Ovechkin, and Couturier. Even if we expect a dip moving forward, it’s very clear Tatar will vastly improve a New Jersey offense that ranked 25th in 5v5 goals from 2018-21.

• Tatar is not an empty calorie scorer. What I mean by that is he’s not someone who produces offense, but at the expense of defense or play driving ability. He gets results across the board. Tatar leads all forwards in xGF% over the last three seasons and has a +42 goal differential at 5v5 to show for it. Playing with fantastic two-way players like Brendan Gallagher and Phillip Danault helped. I’d be ignorant to suggest otherwise. But it’s not as if Tatar didn’t pull his weight. He’s a very well-rounded player who will nicely compliment Nico Hischier and/or Jack Hughes at both ends of the rink.

• Not to get into a Pavel Zacha debate again – he’s turned into a solid point producer, particularly on the man advantage – but Tatar’s presence lessens the likelihood of Zacha playing alongside Hischier or Hughes. That is a good thing for the Devils. From 2019-21, Hischier’s on-ice goals share was 8.53% higher without Zacha. No. 86 benefited from Zacha’s absence even more so, posting a goals share 9.08% higher without Zacha. Both players posted higher xG percentages away from No. 37 as well, although the difference in Hischier’s wasn’t large. The point is, though, that Zacha’s not a top-6 winger at 5v5 in terms of production, and he certainly isn’t when it comes to on-ice impacts. Tatar helps keep Zacha down the lineup.

• Tatar doesn’t just make the Devils a better team; he gives the kids more time to develop. I’m very optimistic about how good the likes of Alexander Holtz and Dawson Mercer can be. But they’re not ready to make an immediate impact. They need more development time; and this kind of move helps ensure they get it. Tom Fitzgerald isn’t putting himself in a position where he feels he needs to rush anybody.

  If Holtz, let’s say, goes to Utica and puts up a point a game for 2-3 months while showing improvement off-puck, the Devils can re-evaluate and find a spot for him then. But he’s not being handed anything.

  Let Holtz play a big role in the AHL and prove himself for a while. He can come up when he earns it; much like we saw with Nolan Foote last season.

• For fun, we’ll assume the Devils had to pay Tatar $500K more per season than he could have fetched elsewhere. My take: who cares? The Devils still have more than $14 million in space this season with essentially a full roster in place. And next summer P.K. Subban’s $9 million comes off the books. The Devils are swimming in space. They need guys who can play. Tatar can, and he’ll be off the books by the time he can’t. The term is so short that the money is irrelevant. Giving Tatar a few hundred thousand extra, if that even happened, would definitely be preferable to not getting him. Not to mention, I’m *pretty* sure he’s worth the money.

  dom at the athletic @domluszczyszyn

  Good deal and good term for a productive analytics darling. Tatar might not be this good, but he's probably still very much worth his new deal.

  

• Please, whatever you do, don’t play the ‘if he’s so good, why didn’t he play in the playoffs?’ card. First and foremost, we don’t need to appeal to authority and assume every decision is the right one. I’m fairly certain somebody who, this past year, produced at a ~50 point clip while posting fantastic on-ice numbers is more deserving of playing than Jake Evans or Artturi Lehkonen. And if we are going to appeal to authority, I’d trust that former Stanley Cup winner Claude Julien – who used Tatar almost exclusively on L1 for years – has better judgement than Dom Ducharme.

  ‘Maybe Tatar didn’t dress because he’s simply not a playoff player!’ That’s a fun theory; one I disagree with completely.

  Tatar’s line *always* drew the toughest matchups and was focused on defense first. And, no, that’s not a lame excuse. There’s a reason Brendan Gallagher put up six points – including just one in seven games vs Toronto – in 22 playoff games. That top unit was largely tasked with shutting down everybody else. Gallagher wasn’t punished for a lack of production so it’s not really fair to cite that as a reason to bench Tatar.

  @JFreshHockey echoed some of this sentiments in a tweet thread on Tatar.

  JFresh @JFreshHockey

  He was bound to be had for a discount following his playoff scratching. Frankly I would say that his "playoff ghost" reputation is based more on a combination of the Danault line being turned into a pure shutdown unit and a 4.1% on-ice shooting percentage but what do I know

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numbers via NaturalStatTrick.com, CapFriendly.com, and PuckPedia.com