The New Jersey Devils haven’t had the best season but one player played a little bit better than we would have expected. Could Dakota Mermis stick around?
Dakota Mermis was signed by the Arizona Coyotes after winning the Memorial Cup with the Oshawa Generals in 2015. He was afforded the opportunity to make his NHL debut with them thanks to an injury to Niklas Hjalmarsson in 2017. He played a total of ten games with them over his tenure there before signing with the New Jersey Devils last summer.
He has had an interesting path to where he is now, that is for sure. Well, his first impression with the New Jersey Devils certainly was a unique one. It is unclear if he will stick around for a while but he didn’t hurt his chances at a tryout next season with his play this year. He played a total of ten games on New Jersey’s blue line in 2019-20.
In those ten games, he was much better than most would have anticipated. He hasn’t been locked into an NHL spot and is now 26 years old so it is fair to not get carried away. With that said, he was good in his short time with the big club. He had one goal and three assists for four points in those ten games with New Jersey. He was paired with Damon Severson for a lot of it which is a good partner if you are looking for some offense. He was also a plus-seven on a bad New Jersey team that had a minus-41 team goal differential.
You can make the argument that he was the team’s best defenseman during those ten games, but the rest of the pack wasn’t all that good. He deserves a chance to come back and compete for a spot in 2020-21, whenever that starts. With the way he played for the New Jersey and Binghamton Devils, he will certainly be playing pro hockey somewhere.
In Binghamton, he didn’t have the offensive numbers that he had with the Devils but the ones in New Jersey were in a much smaller sample size with a better partner. In 53 games for them, he had three goals and 16 assists for 19 points and was a plus-six. Plus/minus is argued a lot as far as it’s importance, but when looking at his NHL plus-seven, it is meaningful because of how bad the Devils were at giving up the high danger chances.
The biggest key for Mermis to stick in the NHL is his play defensively. The fact that he was a pretty good puck mover in his 10 New Jersey games is impressive, but he needs to be good in his own end. He was good defensively as well, but in order to stay, he needs it to continue. This will be a big training camp and preseason for him if the Devils give him another contract.
The reason he gets an A- is because he deserves it. He had little expectations from us going into those games and he was surprisingly good. He earned himself another chance in the NHL when hockey comes back and he deserves credit for that.