5 New Jersey Devils Legends That Would Have Been Better Off Staying Here
The New Jersey Devils have a long history of stars leaving for “greener” pastures. More times than not, it didn’t work out for them.
For years, the joke has been the New Jersey Devils make stars out of players for them to make money elsewhere. It’s not always about the Devils being cheap, per se. They showed with contracts for players like Scott Stevens, Ilya Kovalchuk and Nico Hischier that they are willing to pay big for insane talent. There are a few examples where a player found a team willing to pay out the nose, and the Devils and Lou Lamoriello/Ray Shero just didn’t see the value in going for that type of overpay.
There’s a laundry list of players who left, but the list of people who succeeded when they left is not very high. The one player who absolutely succeeded when they left was Scott Niedermayer. He went to go play with his brother on the Anaheim Ducks after spending a year on the shelf due to the 2004 NHL Lockout. They ended up winning a Stanley Cup together.
Heck, even Martin Brodeur himself, the greatest goaltender of all time and the best player in Devils history, tried to leave for greener pastures. In December of 2014, Brodeur decided to sign with the St. Louis Blues in December of 2014 when Brian Elliott went down with an injury. He was fine. (Go look at his game log, he had two bad performances, two great ones and two mediocre ones. He was fine.)
So, which situations went the absolute worst for players that left New Jersey? There’s a lot to choose from. Whether it’s because of legacy, or for the betterment of their career, these five players would have been better off just staying in New Jersey.
Bobby Holik
So, here’s where the argument of “better off” tends to take a turn, but we’re talking about on-the-ice performance only. Obviously, Holik is happy that the New York Rangers paid him $45 million over five years in 2002. Nobody else was going to pay him $9 million per season, so there’s no way he could say no to leaving the Devils for their biggest rival.
Things seemed to sour between the Devils and Holik starting with arbitration in 2001. The negotiator gave Holik a one-year, $3.5 million evaluation. When Holik signed with the Rangers, he said he gave the Devils more than one chance to sign him to a long-term deal. He said it was a 13-month process, which shows he wasn’t happy with how the Devils went about the negotiating process. Still, the Devils were never going to come close to making him the highest paid player on the team.
Holik would only play two seasons with the New York Rangers. He never really hit the heights he had in New Jersey, but he was already on the wrong side of 30 when he signed that contract. His second season saw him get 56 points and almost 100 PIMs, showing the tough-guy persona they Rangers paid for. Still, right after that was the 2004 Lockout, and the Rangers used their compliance buyout to send Holik packing.
The reason the Rangers signed Holik was to become relevant again. In two seasons at Madison Square Garden, he never played a playoff game. He might not have been terrible in New York, but he failed at his goal and the team’s goal, leading to them to cut him unceremoniously.
If he stayed with the Devils, he would at least have one more Stanley Cup Championship, with the Devils winning in 2003. His style still fit what the Devils were looking for, so the Devils could have paired him with John Madden and Jay Pandolfo. Who would be center wouldn’t matter much, but imagine having those three just destroying people as a bottom-six line.
Holik’s career did end up coming back to New Jersey, but he was a shell of himself. He ended up being a healthy scratch by the end of the 2008-09 season. If Holik had the same exact career, only spending it entirely with the Devils, he’d be second in the team’s history in points with 727. He’d most likely have number 16 hanging in the rafters.
Scott Gomez
This one is the most obvious on the list. Scott Gomez watched his career fall apart after leaving the Devils. He also decided to sign with the New York Rangers, and they again decided to get themselves out of that contract before it was done. He was so bad, fans started the website didgomezscore.com. (Don’t go there, it doesn’t exist anymore, which makes me kind of sad.)
Gomez left the Devils in 2007. The Rangers gave him a 7-year contract worth more than $51 million. That’s a pretty significant contract post lockout. His time with the Rangers was… fine? He had 70 points in that first season with the team, and he actually beat the Devils in the Stanley Cup Playoffs first round.
His second season saw quite the drop in points, going from 70 to 58. Things seemed like they were making a wrong turn, and the Rangers smartly traded him to the Montreal Canadiens. The centerpiece on paper to the Rangers looked like Christopher Higgins, but the player who did the most damage was obviously Ryan McDonagh.
If Gomez stayed with the Devils, Lou Lamoriello would have put him in the best situation to succeed. Lou had a special place in his heart for the players he drafted that ended up working out. Gomez left, and nobody was taking care of him anymore. He was expected to be the straw that stirred the drink. In a piece for The Player’s Tribune, he made it clear he was looking for change to get to a place he was before. However, he was always there in New Jersey. If he stayed there, we see those issues he had in Montreal, San Jose and Florida would actually become strengths in New Jersey.
Brian Gionta
Brian Gionta is overall an underrated player. He left the New Jersey Devils in 2009 to sign with the Montreal Canadiens for 5 years and $25 million. His time in Montreal was also fine. That’s literally what most of these players turned into. They are all fine.
Gionta stayed for the length of the contract, scoring 97 goals over the five years. He was just under a 20-goal-per-season player. That’s not really all that great, but he did become the Canadiens captain and led them to the Conference Finals twice. The Canadiens don’t regret signing Gionta, but they definitely did not get what they hoped for out of the Gomez-Gionta pairing.
If he stayed with the Devils, he still wouldn’t have ever hit the 48-goal highs he did in 2005-06, but he’d likely still be a 25-goal player across his career. He’s obviously a smaller player, but he knew how to play the type of game that kept players signing him. Lamoriello loves those types of players, and would do what he could to set them up for success.
We all know about Lamoriello’s shortfalls in the mid-2000s, but they were still a playoff team year in and year out. Maybe with the leadership of Gionta to take over when Jamie Langenbrunner left, we wouldn’t have to deal with Zach Parise breaking hearts as the captain. Gionta could be known as one of the biggest fan favorites in team history if he stuck around.
Ilya Kovalchuk
Alright, this one is going to take some convincing. Nobody is arguing the Devils aren’t better off now without the albatross contract that Ilya Kovalchuk had. The New Jersey Devils were hurt and helped by him leaving when he did. When looking into why he left and what happened after he left, it’s hard to argue that Kovalchuk wasn’t better off staying in New Jersey.
Based on the articles that came out right after Kovalchuk decided to “retire” so he could play in Russia, it sounded like the escrow in the collective bargaining agreement was the straw that broke the camel’s back for him. Still, he was ready to make $46 million over the next four years. Now, according to Forbes, even with the escrow, U.S. taxes, the jock tax and his agent fee, he still would have taken home $17 million.
In Russia, his contract was reportedly for $4.4 million per season, but with escrow and taxes and other secret agreements, who knows what he was actually making. Then, the Russian ruble tanked. Because of the currency value, he ended up taking home around $13 million over those same four years.
During that time, Kovalchuk won an Olympic gold medal, which may be invaluable to him, but there were no NHL players in the tourney, so it definitely has an asterisk next to it. Kovalchuk ended up signing a contract worth more than $18 million with the Los Angeles Kings, but he was cut and signed with the Canadiens (this seems to be a theme of this article). He reshaped his image, and was sent to the Washington Capitals to play with Alexander Ovechkin.
Sure, things worked in a mysterious way, but Kovalchuk’s career would have been looked at in the same vein as Ovechkin if he stuck with the Devils. He hit 83 points in the 2011-12 season, the last full season he had with the Devils. He was built to last, and he’d stay at least a 65-point player for the next five years. There’s a reason he desperately wanted to get back to the NHL a year early, where the Devils would have had to trade his rights. Legacy means something more in the NHL.
John MacLean
This one’s about a lot more than production, this is about legacy. John MacLean was great before the Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayers and Marty Brodeurs joined the Devils. He had 701 points in 934 games, including one point in his first 23 games. At his peak, he was scoring 40 goals and 75 points every season.
MacLean asked for a trade out of New Jersey back in 1997. The Devils won the 1995 Stanley Cup Championship with the help of MacLean, but things hit a fever pitch, and MacLean went public with his desire to leave the only franchise he knew. He wasn’t the first player looking to see if the grass was greener, but he might have been the most significant. Lou Lamoriello traded him to a terrible team for almost nothing. He went to the San Jose Sharks for a depth defenseman and an AHL player.
That offseason, MacLean signed with the New York Rangers for a forgettable end to his career. The Rangers ended up sending MacLean to the minors because he wouldn’t agree to their buyout terms, and ended up sending him to Dallas.
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MacLean’s ego seemed to be something that hurt him at times, but it also was just something that didn’t fit with Lou. Either way, to be great you must have something of an ego. If he stuck with the Devils, the pressures of living up to the decisions he made wouldn’t be there, and he could just stick around being a franchise great. His number 15 would be in the rafters today, and he would have added another 200 points to his career totals, forcing Patrik Elias to wait a little longer to break his record. MacLean was much better off in New Jersey, and when he left his career never recovered.