It's been a busy offseason for Sunny Mehta and the New Jersey Devils, with a clear emphasis on bolstering the forward corps. The bustle continued Wednesday morning, when it was announced that the Devils signed veteran sniper Anthony Mantha to a two-year, $4.75 million AAV contract.
Mantha was the third forward added to the roster, joining Evan Rodrigues and Jesper Boqvist, both of whom were acquired in the trade that sent aging netminder Jacob Markstrom to the Florida Panthers. Now, more than it has since perhaps the franchise-record 2022-23 season, the Devils' forward corps looks extremely deep.
With the additions, though, particularly in Rodrigues and Mantha, the writing might be on the wall for a Dawson Mercer departure.
Plainly, both of the new additions are better players than Mercer is. Mercer, still only 24 and having not missed a game in his career, struggles to drive play on his own and has plateaued quite a bit over time, never matching his production from three seasons ago and, in some ways, regressing.
The high-end flashes of skill are no longer there with consistency, and he has blended into the background more and more as time has gone on. Perhaps it is by virtue of the systems he is playing in, perhaps it is because the team as a whole has regressed, or perhaps it is because of the difficult defensive matchups he has been given while playing next to Nico Hischier, but Mercer has slowly trended laterally or even downward in the last few seasons.
Mantha, meanwhile, is fresh off a 33-goal season and has a pattern of winning his minutes heavily while playing in third-line deployment. He has scored an average of 25 goals per 82 games for his career and plays in the exact type of way that would work extremely well in the Devils' top six, particularly alongside Jack Hughes and Jesper Bratt.
As for Rodrigues, his production has been somewhat lackluster, but from an on-ice perspective, things couldn't be much better. In the last five seasons, he has had an expected goal share (xGF%) of at least 53.5% in each of the last five seasons, including two campaigns with an xGF% bordering on 60%. In the playoffs, he has scored 30 points -- nine goals and 21 assists -- in his last two postseasons (45 games), with his former teammate giving him a glowing review.
So, one addition is a goal-scorer with the exact attributes that would mesh well alongside the two best players on the Devils, while the other is a proven playoff rockstar with a penchant for driving play and winning his minutes. Those two should immediately be ahead of or in contention with Mercer in the top-six. That doesn't even include Arseny Gritsyuk, whose third-line performance in 2025-26 gave reason to believe there is much, much more in the tank.
Mercer certainly isn't supplanting any of the core forwards, and it looks like he'll be playing behind or in competition with all of Gritsyuk, Mantha, and Rodrigues for the final two spots in the top six. Given Mehta's clear attraction toward players who do a lot of stuff on the ice and Mercer's penchant for turning invisible for stretches, it's quite possible that he has already played his last game in a Devils uniform.
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