When any team sees a full rebuild through, there’s always a feeling that time doesn’t apply to them. They’ve stuffed the roster with young, promising players, whose peaks aren’t even here yet and are off in the distance. There will always be another swing, always another chance to finish it off with a parade. But the NHL doesn’t work that way. It’s more likely that something can always go wrong, and pretty much any season even in playoff contention is sacred. It’s a lesson the New Jersey Devils should learn during their talks with Luke Hughes.
It’s six days into training camp now, and Hughes The. Youngest still isn’t skating with the Devils. His contract negotiations have stalled. Both the Devils and Hughes’s camp seem to have agreed to an eight-year, maximum deal. What they can’t nail down is the money. Hughes might be asking for anything up to $10 million per year. The Devils want to keep that lower.
The Devils are in the somewhat strange position of Hughes’s eventual cap hit not being a problem in the future, but right now. Usually, teams on the ascent (if the Devils still can be defined that way) are worried about when all the bills come due two or three years down the line. The Devils don’t have to do that. Jack Hughes is locked up for another four years after this one. So is Timo Meier. Same goes for Jesper Bratt. That goes for Brett Pesce as well. Jonathan Kovacevic has multiple years left, though some health questions now. Jonas Siegenthaler, he of the mythical “best defensive defenseman” realm, only has another two years left, as does Nico Hischier.
But the Devils have, at the moment, $24 million in cap space for next year, and $62 million for the year after that. To boot, they’ll have some expiring contracts next season that can probably be moved without too much fuss, such as Brenden Dillon, or Stefan Noesen, or maybe even Ondrej Palat if it comes to it.
The problem for the Devils GM Tom Fitzgerald is this season. New Jersey only has about $6 million in space, before signing Hughes to whatever he’s going to get, and clearly only $6 million isn’t going to be enough to get Hughes to sign on the dotted line. They can see the clearing on the horizon, but they have to hack their way through some pretty gnarly thicket to get there.
The Devils need to, though. They’ve been “the next big thing” for a couple seasons now, and usually when teams don’t seize that when it’s available, it goes away forever. Too many of the Devils are in their primes right now–Hughes The Elder, Meier, Hischier, Pesce, Siegenthaler, Bratt. They have goalie questions beyond this season, as Jacob Markstrom will be a free agent after this season, with no long-term apprentice ready to step into the main job.
The landscape is bending back to the Devils, too, at least in the Metro Division. The Caps are due for some shooting-luck deflation and are aging. The Canes have the same questions about goaltending and frontline scoring as they always do, and may just take the regular season easy like they did last year to focus on making any kind of impact beyond the second round for once. The rest of the division is bilge. The Pennsylvania duo are in detention, the Islanders are far away, the Rangers could implode at any moment if they don’t get other worldly goaltending, and the Jackets could be anything but aren’t ready to challenge at the top of the division yet. And that’s if everything goes right for them.
Fitzgerald should be punting Dillon into the sun, as no team has ever needed him, much less the Devils. Yet there’s always a team that can be duped into thinking they need his imaginary “solid presence.” If they need to LTIR Kovacevic to open up more space, then that lever needs to be pulled.
The Devils can’t play at the speed they need to, the one that causes most opponents to step on their tongues in the second period, without Hughes. They need get-up-and-go at least on the top two pairs, if not all three. Hughes and Pesce on the second gives them that. They may think with the age of so much of the roster that there will always be another swing. The sand runs out in the hourglass faster than most teams think, and the next project is ready to take their place. The Devils need to act like that.
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