The New Jersey Devils season is over. There’s no other way to say it. They were shut out in a game they absolutely had to win. And it isn’t even like they got beaten by a goalie playing out of his mind. Elvis Merzlikins was fine. The Devils didn’t really test him.
This is a lifeless team, and it’s been lifeless for months. During that time, nothing has been done to address said lifelessness. The team is just continuously put out there game after game.
What has been done this season alone to get this team up and running? They addressed a treasure trove of injuries by repeatedly claiming that returning players were enough to sustain, despite years of evidence that injured players often don’t return at the same level.
They watched as the Minnesota Wild made the Quinn Hughes trade. This was a trade that was in Tom Fitzgerald’s lap. When the Vancouver Canucks season went down the drain, Fitzgerald should have said, “Give me your price.” The Canucks GM literally said the eldest Hughes brother wanted to go to New Jersey! Jack Hughes said on the record he wanted Quinn Hughes in New Jersey! And Quinn didn’t retort!
Yet, Quinn Hughes is loving life in Minnesota, and Jack and Luke Hughes are both hurt.
The Devils tried to move Dougie Hamilton in the offseason, but they couldn’t get the price they wanted from the 10 teams on his trade list. That turned into an absolute disaster, and hit a fever pitch when they very publicly benched Hamilton. That only lasted one game! They took weeks of bad publicity because of how they handled the benching, and it was only for the first half of a back-to-back.
Ondrej Palat was finally traded last week, but it came way too late and for way too little. The Devils basically had to pay two draft picks to the New York Islanders just to get out of the rest of his contract.
There is one thing connecting all these bad moves. Tom Fitzgerald was once a really good GM. Then, he turned into an above-average GM. Now, he’s a bad GM.
What broke him? The 2023-24 season broke him.
Tom Fitzgerald became a different general manager in 2024
That offseason was a transitional one. Damon Severson, Ryan Graves, Miles Wood, Jesper Boqvist, Tomas Tatar, Yegor Sharangovich, Mackenzie Blackwood, and Jonathan Bernier (who retired with a hip injury). He signed both Timo Meier and Jesper Bratt to eight-year contracts that offseason. He also re-signed Nathan Bastian and Michael McLeod, shrewd moves that allowed them to become unrestricted free agents before they returned to New Jersey.
He even added Tyler Toffoli to add offense to the roster. A lot of this worked.
However, he didn’t fix the one major flaw on the roster: goaltending. Akira Schmid and Vitek Vanecek were a house of cards in net, and it worked out exactly as you could have imagined. The goaltending sank the season, along with so many things going wrong.
McLeod was arrested. Meier was half the man he was a year prior. Jack Hughes hurt his shoulder. Luke Hughes wasn’t the second coming of Paul Coffey. Alex Holtz was inconsistent. Dougie Hamilton suffered a serious injury.
So much went wrong with the season. And they fired Lindy Ruff after he couldn’t get the club back in place.
Fitzgerald then went and hired Sheldon Keefe. On paper, the hire made sense. He got a guy whom many wanted, but he took him from Toronto’s doldrums and gave him a second chance. However, it’s become clear he wasn’t the right fit for this roster. Something isn’t working with his offensive system. Whether he’s giving too much of the game plan to Jeremy Colliton, or if this is something that’s coming from higher than him, but the destruction of the Ruff offensive system has this team going from the most fun team in the league to the worst watch in sports.
On Tuesday night, it was one of the worst performances of the season. Jacob Markstrom, another Fitzgerald mistake, played about as well as one could expect, but the Devils didn’t score. In a desperate game against a Columbus Blue Jackets team that couldn’t get shots on net in the first two periods, the Devils scored zero goals.
And now, the season is over. Fitzgerald is the guy at the most fault. Is it all his fault? It doesn’t matter because it is his job to fix it. And he didn’t. He had multiple opportunities to fix it, but he didn’t, and now, another year of the Nico Hischier-Jack Hughes prime is wasted.