The New Jersey Devils made it public that they have fired general manager Ray Shero about an hour before puck drop which makes it a strange move.
The New Jersey Devils are having a terrible season. They are in the last place in the Metropolitan Division as of Saturday night. They are also in a three-way tie for the second-worst record in the entire league. This all comes after a tremendous offseason that set expectations clearly too high to handle. They believed that they would be a team that competed for the playoffs, but instead they are potentially going to be in the lottery for the third time in four seasons.
Whenever a season is a massive failure like that, there are some casualties. There already have been some major changes to the organization though. They have traded the face of their franchise, Taylor Hall, to the Arizona Coyotes for some picks and prospects. They traded him because he was on an expiring contract and was likely going to free agency. A few weeks prior to that, they fired head coach John Hynes. There is no doubt that this has been a season of a shock for those fans who believed it would be a strong season.
There is no doubt that this season has been bad but the timing of the Ray Shero firing is strange. Most fans didn’t believe that he was the problem like they did the coach. It was something that wasn’t talked about often by anybody who paid attention closely. They are using Tom Fitzgerald as the acting GM right now. When it was announced on Twitter on Sunday night, it came across as a strange move for three major reasons: