5 New Jersey Devils Who Could Win Awards This Season
By Nick Villano
Tom Fitzgerald – Jim Gregory General Manager of the Year
Talk about a makeup award. Tom Fitzgerald absolutely deserved to be a finalist for the Jim Gregory GM of the Year award last season. The issue is when voters fill out their ballots. Unlike other awards, those ballots are filled out after the second round of the playoffs. It’s almost exclusively teams that are in the final four.
Fitzgerald not only put together a Devils team that couldn’t get out of the basement and turned them into a Stanley Cup contender, but he did it while make a miraculous trade for the biggest piece before the NHL Trade Deadline. Timo Meier is not a New Jersey Devil for the next eight years. So is Jesper Bratt.
That’s what is going to get Fitzgerald this award. It is the work he did this past offseason. Signing Bratt and Meier to eight-year deals after the hard negotiations was a miraculous move. Then, there was the underrated move of letting Michael McLeod and Nathan Bastian hit free agency just to immediately re-sign them and trading Yegor Sharangovich and a third-round pick for Tyler Toffoli.
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Fitzgerald might be the most likely winner on this list. The Devils just have to get to the third round of the playoffs. If they don’t, Fitz isn’t winning the award.