New Jersey Devils: What Point Total Equals Success?

The New Jersey Devils have much higher expectations this season. They signed the top free agent on the market in Dougie Hamilton. They made multiple moves to bolster the middle of the roster like signing Tomas Tatar and trading for Ryan Graves. This team is more talented than it was last year, and their ceiling is much higher.

The expectations are wildly different depending on which analysts you ask. There are dozens of models out there trying to predict points. All of them seem to have the Devils in a similar spot. Between 85 and 93 points while fighting for a playoff spot in the middle of the Metropolitan Division. Would that be successful?

93 points probably won’t be enough to make the postseason, but the Devils have broken 90 points once since making the Stanley Cup Final in 2012. This will be 10 seasons since that magical year, and it’s been almost exclusively bad seasons since then. 2017-18 was the outlier there, and the Devils got destroyed in the first round after sneaking into the postseason on the backs of Taylor Hall and Keith Kinkaid.

This season, there isn’t a consensus of what the Devils will be. Former Let’s Go Devils podcast guest JFresh posted the different point totals for all the teams in the Metropolitan Division.

Most of the statical models have them within the standard deviation. There are a few outliers like Evolving Wild (thank you for the 97 point projection), and 538 (their model seems a little outdated and the 81 should be ignored). Obviously, a 97-point season is a massive success. That means a lot went right. An 81-point season is a disappointment. Even though it’s a lot more than last year’s 68-point pace, it just doesn’t cut it with Jack Hughes in year three and signing Hamilton to a deal worth north of $70 million.

90 points feel like the lowest acceptable point total from this team. It still doesn’t feel like a “success” but it’s an acceptable outcome. It’s close, and maybe adding a win or two to that total would feel like a success. As weird as it sounds, 93 sounds like a much bigger success than 90 does, even if both scenarios end without a playoff berth.

The Metro is going to be one of the hardest divisions to make headway. The Devils need to bank some points early, and they can’t lose points against some of the bad teams in the Eastern Conference. Getting to 93 points must be the minimum goal of this team.