Three reasons to be optimistic about the New Jersey Devils in 2025-26

There are several reasons to believe the Devils will be better next season. Let's take a closer look at three of them.

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The New Jersey Devils were the definition of mixed bag last season.

They looked unbeatable for most of the first half and played closer to a lottery team in the second half, ranking 26th in points percentage from January 1st onward.

While the season as a whole was fine, it’s clear the Devils need to be better moving forward.

Let’s take a closer look at a few reasons to be optimistic they will be.

Improved depth scoring

The top half of New Jersey’s roster is good. Great, even! The Devils have a handful of star players capable of driving the bus and producing offense on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, the stars didn’t have much support last year.

Excluding the team’s top-6 forwards by average time on ice per game, Ondrej Palat was the only forward to produce more than 22 points.

Palat didn’t exactly light it up. He had 28 points and finished the season with two goals, and five points, over his final 20 games. Great stuff!

I don’t know that Tom Fitzgerald hit it out of the park this summer but, at the very least, he brought in multiple players capable of reliably contributing more offense beyond the big guns.

Connor Brown isn’t exactly an offensive dynamo but his 30 points last season would’ve ranked 1st on the Devils excluding their top-6 most used forwards.

Evgenii Dadonov is coming off a 20/20 season and has finished with a shooting WAR of +0.9 or better in back-to-back years. He can really finish and gives the team a much more dangerous weapon than they had outside the top-6 last year.

Then there’s Arseniy Gritsyuk. It’s hard to know exactly how quickly he’ll adjust to the NHL game, and how much he will produce, but there’s no denying brings a drastically higher ceiling than Tomas Tatar, Erik Haula, Nathan Bastian, Curtis Lazar, Justin Dowling, and all the depth pieces the team walked away from over the summer.

It’s entirely possible – maybe even likely – the Devils have three new depth players who will pile up more points than the team’s most productive depth forward a season ago. That will make a difference. Perhaps a big one.

Coaching