The New Jersey Devils have a young team, but one of their veterans is still really important to them and will help see this rebuild through.
The New Jersey Devils are a team on the younger side. They have lots of players that are still on their entry-level contracts and those are the important players to this team in the present and future. The thing is, every successful team has a guy they can count on in the room for some leadership, experience, and non-flashy contribution.
Devils’ captain Andy Greene is that guy for them. He is a defenseman that plays hard every time he is out there. He contributes things to the team that you don’t really ever see on the scoresheet unless you dig in deep. Greene had five goals and 20 assists while playing every game for the Devils last season. That was his 3rd most points at 36 years old.
Greene is an awesome penalty killer. In 2018-19, he led the entire NHL in PK time on ice with 4:06 per game. The Devils had the fourth-best penalty kill in the entire NHL. Greene was out there for a lot of those hard PK minutes and was a major factor in the unit being so good. If the Devils PK wasn’t so good they probably would have finished even lower in the standings.
He takes some heat sometimes from the Devils fanbase, but he has been misplaced for the second half of his career. There were some years where he was the team’s number-one defenseman when he shouldn’t have been. He was the go-to guy on a bad team, and it made him look bad at certain points. However, as the Devils defense has slowly started to get better he has looked a little better.
He hasn’t been a + player since 2015-16 and was only a minus player twice before that. So the last few years have been great Devils teams besides once so he has gone where the team has gone. If he can ever be this teams fifth-best defenseman, he would look awesome. After his current contract is over it would be a decent idea to give him another one or two year deal for much less money against the cap.
Andy Greene still provides still has value to this team and hopefully he can keep it up again next year and prove he is worth more years with the team beyond that. Even if they wanna pass on the captaincy to somebody else they can, that happens all the time in the NHL. If he has a bad year he probably won’t be back but we can hope he earns something good out of it.