New Jersey Devils: Five Likely Reasons Behind Ray Shero’s Firing

Setbacks After 2018 Playoff Appearance

Assuming Ray Shero finished out the 2019-20 season, the New Jersey Devils will likely have just one playoff win through five seasons under his watch. To be fair, Shero did inherit an absolute travesty of a roster lacking any team identity and had to establish a new foundation from scratch.

Over the years, Shero constantly reiterated he had a plan in place, hence the term “trust the process,” which has become a trademark slogan among New Jersey Devils fans. When the Devils unexpectedly made the playoffs in 2018, many believed Shero’s vision was coming to fruition.

Expectations were quite high that Shero would have an eventful offseason following New Jersey’s 2018 postseason berth. Between the organization’s abundance of cap space and tradable assets, Shero was expected (and in a perfect position) to make significant improvements and bridge the  talent gap between then-league MVP Taylor Hall and rest of the roster.

Shero’s biggest acquisitions that summer were the free agent signings of Egor Yakolev and Eric Gryba, both of whom collectively played 35 contests in 2018-19. Gryba failed to register a point, while Yakolev tallied just two goals and five assists. The Devils would see players like John Moore, Brian Gibbons and Pat Maroon walk as unrestricted free agents, leaving roster openings that would ultimately be filled internally.

It seemed Shero took for granted that healthy seasons from Kyle Palmieri, Marcus Johansson, along with young up-and-comers like Miles Wood, Blake Coleman and Stefan Noesen taking the next steps forward in their development would suffice in lieu of acquiring outside assets, an assertion of which Shero was off by a mile.

Lackluster Player Development

Save the 2015 NHL Entry draft, New Jersey’s selections from 2016 onward were entirely on Ray Shero. Although Lou Lamoriello probably dictated the previous year’s selections, Shero’s regime was ultimately responsible for their development. Aside from a few obvious exceptions, New Jersey has failed to develop any blue chip prospects that became worthwhile NHL players for years, something that didn’t quite change under Shero.

With the exception of 2017 first-overall pick Nico Hischier (Jack Hughes will likely pan out similarly), only two players drafted by the New Jersey Devils since 2015 have played more than a full season’s worth of NHL games—Pavel Zacha and Jesper Bratt. Zacha, who was selected sixth overall in the 2015 NHL entry draft, has just 32 goals and 94 points in 242 NHL games. Although he occasionally shows flashes of being a resourceful defensive forward, the bottom-six player he’s molding into is a far cry from the up-tempo power forward he was projected to become.

This, along with the lineage of 1st rounders taken after Zacha that went on to become impactful players—Ivan Provorov, Zach Werenski, Timo Meir, Mikko Rantanen, Jake DeBrusk, Mathew Barzal, Kyle Connor, Thomas Chabot, Brock Boeser, Anthony Beauvillier—makes Zacha’s selection all the more woeful and is a testament to the organization’s flawed ability to properly develop and utilize young players.

While Mackenzie Blackwood has shown flashes of becoming a capable NHL starter and hopes are still high on 2018 first-round pick Ty Smith, the pickings on genuine NHL talent developed during the Ray Shero era (aside from their two first overall picks) are slim.

Despite their recent play, the Binghamton Devils are poised to miss the playoffs and finish no higher than fifth place in their division for the third straight season. Their roster currently features a whopping 12 players drafted since 2015, many of whom were once highly touted like Michael McLeod (2016, 12th overall), Nathan Bastian (2016, 41st overall), Joey Anderson (2016, 73rd overall) and Fabian Zetterlund (2017, 63rd overall), just to mention a few.

All of these players are on their second or third AHL seasons and aren’t posting numbers anywhere close to being worthy of a call-up.

The fact that not even two or three out of this group has yet to make or stick to the New Jersey Devils roster says a lot about their ability to properly furbish up-and-coming talent, which is something that must be fixed if the organization wants to stop being one of the league’s perpetual basement dwellers.

Fallout After Being the “Winners” of the 2019 Offseason

Along with selecting generational talent Jack Hughes first overall in the 2019 NHL Entry Draft, Shero acquired defenseman P.K. Subban (who you could speculate Shero acquired as a knee-jerk reaction in the wake of the New York Rangers getting Jacob Trouba) for a meager return in exchange for taking on his full $9 million salary, signed bruising veteran Wayne Simmonds and banking on him having a turnaround season and acquired young Russian winger Nikita Gusev from the Vegas Golden Knights.

Despite their concerns in net, many believed these moves put the New Jersey Devils on the path to success and were signs that management believed they were in a prime position to make a serious playoff run.

Four months later and Shero’s seemingly bountiful summer has had little to show. Subban has just five goals and 10 points in 45 games, during which he endured a 21-game point drought, Simmonds only scored four times and hasn’t netted a goal in 26 contests and Jack Hughes is having a very underwhelming rookie campaign with six goals and 17 points in 37 contests, only scoring twice in his last 23 games.

Nikita Gusev has been the most successful out of Shero’s big offseason acquisitions with eight goals and 27 points in 42 contests, especially as of late, but is in no position to carry the weight of this team’s success on his shoulders.

To sum it up, Shero banked on his offseason moves to put the New Jersey Devils over the top in 2019-20, a gamble that blew up in his face. Now the Devils must endure PK Subban’s full $9 million AAV for the next two seasons, won’t likely get a worthwhile return for Wayne Simmonds should they decide to trade him (and might even retain some of his salary to entice a potential trade partner) and are (rightfully so) barely seeing anyone bring up Jack Hughes when discussing this season’s top rookies.

For ownership, the consequences of these moves flopping are not only being reflected in the team’s performance, but in their wallets. They invested their full confidence in Ray Shero to uplift a team that missed the playoffs five of the six years since purchasing the franchise and might have seen the ineffectiveness of his busy summer as a last straw.

Hard to blame them when you consider it’s their money Shero is using, right?

Handling of the Taylor Hall Situation

From failing to re-sign him long-term last summer to the humbling return the Devils got from the Arizona Coyotes, it’s safe to say Ray Shero’s handling of his team’s former cornerstone player Taylor Hall was moot at best. Had things gone differently this season, you can argue Hall might have already signed with the Devils by now, or at least the prospects of it happening would have been more assuring.

Throughout the summer and beginning of the season, Hall’s party iterated they were in no rush to sign an extension, which raised prospects of him walking for nothing this summer, like John Tavares did with the New York Islanders in 2018. Throw in the ever-constant risk of Hall suffering an injury, which would further decrease his trade value, along with his relatively disenchanting performance this season, Shero was in a lose-lose situation.

The return for Hall from the Coyotes—defensive prospect Kevin Bahl, forwards Nick Merkley and Nate Schnarr and a 2020 1st-round pick—left a sour taste in the mouths of New Jersey Devils fans. For a star-caliber player in Hall (given he’s currently being perceived as a rental for Arizona), the Devils essentially received two AHL players with projected short ceilings should they crack an NHL roster, a 19-year old 6’7’’ defenseman still in his developmental years and two draft picks.

Throw in how Hall claimed the New Jersey Devils never made a contract offer to him before he was dealt, it only makes the outcome more frustrating to accept.

Shero failed to acquire an asset that could be immediately added to his current roster. The players he did get are, for the most part, question marks that likely won’t replace Hall’s role and contributions any time soon. In the grand scheme of things, the Devils took a substantial step back by trading Hall and you could argue this entire outcome could have been entirely avoided if Shero took more calculated steps.

Shero’s Plan Moving Forward

There’s a lot of speculation and rumors floating around the hockey blogosphere and social media that Shero’s dismissal as general manager was prompted by a clash with ownership over what direction he wanted to take the organization after this season. Shero previously claimed he would stick to the course and didn’t believe trading Hall signified another rebuild, but might have embraced the aspect of going into the trade deadline as a seller, something that ownership might not have been too keen about accepting.

It was expected Shero would entertain offers with established roster players and pending unrestricted free agents like Andy Greene, Sami Vatanen, Wayne Simmonds, Miles Wood and even potential 2021 UFAs like Kyle Palmieri and Travis Zajac. Such moves would open a lot of essential roster spots, while the Devils would lose resourceful players with unique coveted roles.

Even without Taylor Hall, this is a very compelling roster (on paper) that you could argue is only one or two notable acquisitions away from becoming more competitive. From an identity and leadership standpoint, this becomes the team of Nico Hischier and Jack Hughes, a succession plan they lacked when former stars Zach Parise and Ilya Kovalchuk left the organization in back-to-back years.

The Devils’ struggles that facilitated this abysmal season derived from a combination of being distracted by the uncertainty surrounding Taylor Hall, along with the locker room’s subconscious over-reliance on him, former Head Coach John Hynes implementing an incompatible system with his roster, the inept defensive play being a bigger problem than originally perceived and glaring issues in net that carried over from last season.

Most of these issues are fixable if they haven’t already been addressed and in spite of their atrocious record, this current New Jersey Devils roster has a foundation in place to continue building around, which ownership must have recognized. This isn’t to say the Devils will still sell off assets between now and the trade deadline, but whereas Shero might have been intent on pushing the reset button and starting on another clean slate, ownership might have wanted to aggregate the team’s strengths and build around them going forward.