Four Moves the New Jersey Devils Need to Make Before New Year’s Day

Trade Sami Vatanen

I wrote about this last year, it wasn’t popular then and I don’t think it will be very popular now either.  On the surface Vatanen is having a good year.  He’s the lone defenseman on the Devils 1st Power play unit and has nine points in 20 games played.

However, his RelTM numbers from Evolving-Hockey don’t reflect as kindly and neither do his isolates from HockeyViz.com Despite his point production Vatanen’s on-ice play hasn’t improved drastically over what we’ve seen since he came to New Jersey and while he won’t bring as large of a haul as Taylor Hall the skilled RHD will likely bring back a decent return. The Devils could use as many assets as they can get during this season.