Winning the lottery was just the beginning of a big offseason for the New Jersey Devils. The Devils will be heading into the 2019 free agency period with over $30 million in cap space needing to re-sign Will Butcher, Connor Carrick, Pavel Zacha, and Stefan Noesen among other smaller pieces. Butcher and Zacha should command the most money in that group, but I doubt they end up taking up more than $8 million total.
Taylor Hall and Nico Hischier extensions loom as well, so while there’s plenty of cap to go around right now those extensions have to factor in going forward. Taylor Hall will likely see an extension similar to what we saw Mark Stone get and I’d expect Nico Hischier to get one similar to William Nylander‘s deal.
Knowing all of this I created a fictional free agency budget for the Devils and Ray Shero this offseason and posed the question to my twitter. Using @EvolvingWilds contract projections and a maximum limit of $14 million, which unrestricted free agents would you choose to target?
Before we get started I strongly encourage you to check out EvolvingHockey.com. The site is an absolute gold mine of data and is where we’ll get our information from for this.
All right Devils fans. Pretend you’re Ray Shero with me for a minute. The owners give you a free agency budget of $11.4m this offseason. You can’t go above that budget, can only sign UFA’s for this exercise, and every player is willing to sign in NJ. Who ya got? https://t.co/ZKWjrKLpZW
— Tyler Kelley (@DocKelley41) May 8, 2019
I received a ton of answers and it was fun so now it’s time to talk about the answers, the good and the bad, and then what I think the best course of action is with regard to adding as much talent within this artificial budget.
To roughly figure out the value a player could add given their projected cap hit I used both Evolving Wild’s contract projections and their GAR data. I took the past three years of GAR data for each player mentioned and determined a rough value provided given that contract for each player.
Let’s start with one of the more common replies.