New Jersey Devils: Five Likely Reasons Behind Ray Shero’s Firing
By Mike Luci
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.
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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.