The date is September 20, 2022, and the NHL world was shocked by three retirement announcements. P.K. Subban, Keith Yandle, and Zdeno Chara announced their retirements within a few hours. While Yandle and Chara will have their own celebrations, we’ll examine P.K. Subban’s time in the NHL. More specially, though, this retrospective will be about Subban’s time with the New Jersey Devils. For the past three years, P.K. Subban as a Devil has been a very underwhelming experience. However, let’s look at how his three years in Jersey started.
2019-20: P.K. Subban Gets Traded to the Devils in the Draft and Starts to Slow Decline
The story begins at the 2019 NHL Draft. The Devils drafted Jack Hughes 1st overall, and everyone seemed satisfied so far in the offseason. Then the following day, the Devils pulled off a draft day trade that made headlines around the league. The Devils traded prospects Steve Santini and Jeremey Davis along with two second-round picks to the Nashville Predators to acquire P.K. Subban. Trading for Subban made sense at the time. In the past few years with Nashville, Subban was still an elite defenseman. It looked like the Devils got exactly what they needed on the blue line.
While he may not have been what he was in Montreal with the Canadiens, he was still a good enough player, making him a target that off-season. The idea of getting Subban was to fix up the defense and get a defensive player to help the young guys like Damon Severson and Will Butcher. Unfortunately, in his first year, a steep decline started for Subban, keeping him from being who he once was. While he was nowhere near awful, he wasn’t looking like how he played in Nashville.
Offensive-wise, he was not very good, only scoring seven goals and 11 assists. On defense, Subban was okay, but he wasn’t as above average as everyone hoped him to be. While he did bring personality to the team, it wasn’t a promising start to his new career stop, but then it got worse than he realized.