The New Jersey Devils had some of the very best players to ever grace a sheet of ice also wear the red and black and extend their professional career in the Garden State. Eleven players have played for the New Jersey Devils and are currently enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame. That will become 12 when Alexander Mogilny is finally given his just due during the next Hall of Fame ceremony.
Some were here for a long time, like Scott Niedermayer, Scott Stevens, and the greatest goalie of all time, Martin Brodeur. Others had a shorter role on the team, like Brendan Shanahan and Petr Statsny. There are even Hall of Famers you forgot played for the Devils, like Dave Andreychuk and Viacheslav Fetisov.
However, none of those players are considered one of the best of all time. At least, that’s what artificial intelligence says.
Sports media outlet RG tested four AI models: ChatGPT, DeepSeek V3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Twitter’s Grok 3.0. They asked who the greatest hockey player of all time was, and the results are very interesting.
There are legendary players across eras, and this tries to take that into account. The criteria asked them to look at stats, historical impact, and to take era and competition into account. So, when it’s all said and done, only one former Devils player made the list.
Brodeur wasn’t mentioned on any of the model’s lists. All of the top-ten lists had Wayne Gretzky at the top, Bobby Orr second, and Mario Lemieux third. Then, we start to see changes in the lists, but nobody mentioned the best goalie of all time. Some had Dominik Hasek and Patrick Roy, which calls some things into question.
Jaromir Jagr was named by AI as one of the best players of all time
Two of the four lists had former Devils’ star Jaromir Jagr. Yes, he was only with the Devils for two seasons, but he was incredibly impactful to a Devils team that was recovering from the retirement of Ilya Kovalchuk. He spent 139 games in New Jersey, and he finished with 96 points.
Jagr was ranked fifth of all time on ChatGPT’s list, but he was left off two other lists. It’s interesting that the four models had such different rankings for Jagr.
The argument for “greatest of all time” is one of the arguments that AI will never solve. This exercise is proof of that. From model to model, they can’t agree on Jagr’s impact despite having the same criteria input into the model. Still, it’s interesting to see what the models say.