It is far, far too late in the season for this kind of surge, but the New Jersey Devils are now 7-3-0 in their last 10 games after surviving the Nashville Predators 4-2 on Thursday night.
A playoff push is all but improbable at this point, but the Devils are building serious momentum--at least we hope--towards the 2026-27 season. After being the United States' Olympic hero in Milan, franchise forward Jack Hughes is playing like a true superstar again.
He's always been this good, but this version of Hughes looks more like the one that set the Devils franchise record for scoring in 2022-23 and finished one point shy of 100.
And Hughes isn't the only one who has come back to life post-Olympics. Linemate Jesper Bratt, who was having a total fail of a season, has six goals, 13 assists, 19 points, and a +4 rating across his last 14 games. That's a 111-point, 76-assist pace over an 82-game season, which would see him shatter his own Devils single-season assist record that he set a year ago.
The good news is that Bratt, 27, is one goal away from reaching 20 for the fifth consecutive season, and he's already secured his fifth straight 60-point campaign.
It's also worth noting that Arseny Gritsyuk and Connor Brown each have seven 5-on-5 points in the last 14 points, which trail only Hughes (9) and Bratt (8). The Devils' top-nine has legitimately played well.
Lost in all this too-little, too-late hype, fairly or unfairly, is Devils head coach Sheldon Keefe, who is widely presumed to be looking for a new job at season's end.
But, if the Devils can maintain this level of play for the last month and a half of the season, should they still have the same motivation or appetite to cut the former Toronto Maple Leafs bench boss loose?
As a professional coach, Keefe has made the playoffs in every season (except for this one, we can safely assume), and the Devils are finally scoring and playing the high-flying style signature to Keefe's Maple Leafs teams during his tenure north of the border.
We saw at the beginning of this season, as well as last season, that the Devils are capable of playing dominant hockey for stretches of time. The key, obviously, is putting that together for a full 82-game season, plus the playoffs at some point.
Time will decide if Keefe is ultimately the right man to steer this ship, but his recent results should certainly put him in consideration for one last ride in New Jersey. I side with the wins and losses, but GM Tom Fitzgerald and the Devils' ownership group might have other plans for next season.