While never a GM, Sheldon Keefe is very well aware of the struggles that come with fitting superstar players under a salary cap. He was the head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs from 2020 to 2024. That entire time, Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, and John Tavares were signed to massive deals. Keefe was still coaching the Marlies when most of them signed their deals, but it was all set up by the most famous holdout of the last 10 years.
William Nylander held out for months, expecting to get the price he was looking for on a new deal. Nylander didn’t sign his six-year deal until minutes before the contract deadline that would have forced him to sit out the entire season.
There is a difference in the Devils and Maple Leafs’ situations, as the Devils don’t have a deadline with Luke Hughes. Since he is a 10.2.c distinction due to his games played, he can sign at any time and play this season. Nylander was under a real deadline, but he held firm until December, missing more than two months' worth of games.
The Devils are hoping to avoid anything close to that with Luke Hughes. The team’s 22-year-old defenseman (the same age as Nylander was during his holdout) is looking for a long-term deal, but reports say the two sides are far apart on dollars.
Money could force the Devils to play without their star on the left side to start the season. With Johnny Kovacevic already out with an injury, it would take a strength of the Devils to start questioning its depth. Many are excited with how Ethan Edwards has played so far this preseason, but he’s a decent prospect who is entering his first full year of professional hockey. It makes way more sense for his development to continue in the AHL instead of asking him to replace his former Michigan teammate.
It makes sense for everyone involved to reach a deal, and most experts and analysts we speak to agree: “This is going to get done.”
We love the confidence, but we want to warn the Devils about the feelings that came out of the Nylander holdout. When he finally spoke to the media after signing a six-year deal, Nylander didn’t sound thrilled with how everything went down (via Sportsnet).
"It was a shared learning experience that I don’t ever want to go through again."William Nylander, December 2018
Nylander went on to say that the entire time, Maple Leafs brass kept saying that they were trying to fit him in with everyone else. That seems like a lesson the Devils should learn from this. Don't use teammates to get Luke Hughes to agree to a contract. He understands we live in a salary cap world, but Tom Fitzgerald also has to understand the cap is going up, and salaries are following suit. Teams have to pay for future performance, not just past performance.
The Devils don't want to have Luke Hughes miss games. Fitzgerald already said nobody wins in a holdout. The longer this goes, the more it seems like a holdout is where this is going.
The good news is the Nylander contract holdout had no impact on other Maple Leafs deals. Matthews was signed two months later, and Mitch Marner signed a long-term deal the next September. The Maple Leafs paid handsomely for both those contracts, showing they might have been spooked by the Nylander contract, but neither came with too much pain for the team or player (although many criticized the Marner contract).
Don’t expect the Luke Hughes contract to impact anything for Nico Hischier, Simon Nemec, Quinn Hughes, or anyone else that might be looking for long-term contracts from the Devils in the future.