How Sunny Mehta Raised the Floor by Killing the Other Devils
26-14-2 with Jack Hughes. 16-23-1 without him. Same New Jersey Devils sweater, two different teams, and only one of them could retrieve a puck.
Sunny Mehta got the job on April 16 to bury the second one.
2025-26 in three pieces
The 2025-26 Devils finished 42-37-3 for 87 points, seventh in the Metropolitan Division, 13th in the East, 10 points short of a playoff spot. They scored 230 and allowed 254. At five-on-five they created 169.3 expected goals and allowed 180.1, a 48.5 percent share. League average is 50. They were not unlucky in the direction people usually mean. They were a team that spent the winter getting out-chanced and then needed goaltending to keep the point total from collapsing.
Break the year the way the locker room lived it.
They opened 8-1-0, sat 13-4-1 by mid-November, and held first in the Metro. Then Hughes had finger surgery after what the club called a freak non-hockey accident. He missed 18 games from mid-November through December 21. New Jersey went 8-10-0 without him in that stretch. He came back in a brace, looked like a lesser version of himself into the Olympic break, then posted 41 points in 25 games after he was finally healthy. The late push, 14-10-1 after the Olympic break, was real and it still was not enough. They were eliminated after a 5-1 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers on April 7. Tom Fitzgerald was already gone, fired April 6. The season ended two nights later with a 0-4 loss in Boston, a game in which they held 35.4 percent of the expected goals. The last 10 games of the year were a coin flip dressed as a playoff push: some nights 62 percent expected goals, some nights 35. That is what a roster with a high peak and a soft underbelly looks like in April.
A year earlier the same franchise went 42-33-7 for 91 points, plus-20 in goal differential, and lost a first-round series to the Carolina Hurricanes in five games without Hughes, who had shoulder surgery in March. The talent did not vanish between those two seasons. The supporting cast and the availability did. Last year they finished 27th in goals and 18th in goals against. The power play sat around 22 percent. The penalty kill was 79.3. Neither special-teams number was the problem. The problem was five-on-five when the stars sat down.
What the ice said
Hughes, in 61 games, sat in the 98th percentile of on-ice impact. His expected-goals share at five-on-five was north of 53 percent. Jesper Bratt led the club in wins above replacement and played all 82. Nico Hischier, the captain, was a plus player over a full season and, with Timo Meier, posted a 58.6 percent expected-goals share in a late-season sample of 134 five-on-five minutes. That pair was the best chemistry on the roster. Arseny Gritsyuk’s first real NHL year was not a cameo. He finished as one of the better WAR forwards on the team and earned a three-year extension in June. Dawson Mercer played 82 and stayed above water. Cody Glass, in 70 games, finished with a strong finishing rate on modest minutes. The top of this lineup was not theoretical.
Underneath it, the numbers got ugly in a hurry. Paul Cotter finished with one of the worst WAR marks on the roster over 79 games. Nick Bjugstad was a negative. Maxim Tsyplakov was a negative in 49 games and a negative in the microstats that actually describe how a fourth-liner survives: retrievals, management, exits. On the back end, Simon Nemec played 68 games, scored a career-high 26 points, and still finished as a large negative in WAR. Jonas Siegenthaler and Luke Hughes both finished in the red by that same measure. Brett Pesce played 37 games. Johnathan Kovacevic played 34. The defense that looked deep on paper was a rotation of injured regulars and a former second-overall pick who had not become the player the draft slot promised.
Goaltending was two different sports. Jake Allen, 37 games, 2.74 goals-against average, .903 save percentage, +14.30 goals saved above expected. Jacob Markstrom, 44 games, 3.07, .883, minus-8.06. The club was getting out-chanced at five-on-five and Allen was the reason the standings did not look worse. Markstrom was the reason the standings looked like 87 points instead of something you could sell as a near-miss. Any offseason that treated those two netminders as interchangeable was going to fail the first test.
The worst pairing late in the year, Bjugstad with Lenni Hämeenaho, sat at 35.3 percent expected goals over 72 five-on-five minutes. That is the floor in one number, and we’re not blaming the rookie. A playoff team cannot keep running that out and hoping Hughes covers it.
The man they hired, & the way he prices a roster
Mehta used to watch the Devils practices in Totowa. He built the first full-time hockey analytics department in the league in this building from 2014 to 2018, working under Lou Lamoriello and then Ray Shero. David Blitzer hired him the first time and then again the second time. In between he consulted for the then Phoenix Coyotes and the Washington Capitals, spent six years with the Florida Panthers, and left Florida as assistant general manager and head of analytics after back-to-back Cups in 2024 and 2025. He also spent years as a high-stakes poker player and a derivatives trader. The analytics label is not wrong. It is incomplete. He said himself that he never set out to be a mathematician. He cared about probability because it helped him win at a table, on a trading floor, and in a front office.
That is why the summer did not look like a teardown and did not look like a splash. It looked like a series of priced bets. Mehta explained it in simple terms, too. A fourth-round pick is worth X, the bet on Declan Chisholm is worth Y, and if Y is greater than X you make the trade. He also said depth is two things at once — enough NHL bodies to survive injuries, and enough calculated swings on players the market has not fully priced. That sentence is the embodiment of the 2026 Devils offseason.
He evaluated Sheldon Keefe, kept him, and then changed the room around him. Dave Rogalski was dismissed as goaltending coach. Sergei Brylin departed the organization. Ted Donato came in from 22 years at Harvard. AJ MacLean, who won a Calder Cup on Keefe’s Marlies staff, came in as an assistant. Dan Stewart arrived as the NHL goaltending coach. Leo Luongo, who spent a decade in the Panthers organization and collected the same two rings Mehta did, was named director of goaltending and reports through Martin Brodeur. Braden Birch, another Florida staffer who ran cap and operations, was hired as assistant general manager. Dan MacKinnon and Chuck Fletcher were not retained. This is not a new coach with the old infrastructure. It is the old coach with a different set of people telling him what the roster can actually do. Keefe has two years left on his deal. The leash is not long. The staff around him is no longer the staff that watched the Devils fail to exit their own zone for two winters.
The trades, priced
June 23: Nemec and Tsyplakov to Calgary for a conditional 2027 first (Vegas Golden Knights, via Calgary), a conditional 2028 first (Colorado Avalanche, via Calgary), the 2026 second-round pick that had belonged to the New York Rangers, and defenseman Étienne Morin. Both firsts are top-10 protected. Nemec was a pending restricted free agent. Keeping him meant a raise on a player who had 155 NHL games, flashes of offense, and a defensive profile that sat near the bottom of the league in retrievals and puck management. Moving him meant admitting the second-overall pick from 2022 was not going to be a top-four piece here and extracting two late firsts plus a real prospect instead of another year of hope. What did Mehta care, anyway? It wasn’t his pick.
June 25: a 2027 fourth to Washington for Chisholm, and a 2026 fourth to Detroit for Amadeus Lombardi. Chisholm is 26, played 26 NHL games last season, and exists in the conversation because Mehta has already called him a sleeper as a puck-mover. Lombardi is 23, waiver-eligible, still hunting an NHL debut, and liked by both the internal models and the scouts. These are the bets that look like nothing if they miss and look like theft if either one sticks as a third-pair or fourth-line regular. The cost of being wrong is a fourth-round pick. The cost of being right is a cheaper NHL minute than the ones Cotter and Nemec were playing.
June 30: Markstrom and Angus Crookshank to Florida for Evan Rodrigues, Jesper Boqvist, and Ben Steeves. Markstrom had a limited no-move and a $6 million cap hit that was about to kick in for two more years. He also had a season of negative GSAx. Rodrigues, 32, put up 11 goals and 20 assists in 69 games, averaged 17:00 a night, and has two Cup rings from the same Florida group Mehta just left. He is not a first-line winger. He is a middle-six forward who has already won and who retrieves pucks at a higher rate than the forwards he is replacing. Boqvist is the more complicated piece. He is a former Devil. He scored 13 points in 73 games last year in Florida after a 23-point season the year before. His five-on-five Corsi last year was 48 percent. He is not here to be a scorer. He is here because Mehta has seen him in a structure that demands retrievals and because the alternative was another year of Cotter and Tsyplakov. Steeves is a swing. Markstrom is gone. The expensive negative is off the books. Allen, at $1.8 million, remains the 1A. David Rittich signed for $1 million. Nico Daws was extended for two years. The net is no longer a coin flip between a plus-14 goalie and a minus-8 goalie.
July 1: Hischier signed a five-year extension at $11.7 million per year, $58.5 million total. That deal does not start until 2027-28. It is the most important piece of paper Mehta has signed, and it is the least discussed in the context of the floor because it looks like a star extension instead of what it also is: a decision that the captain is part of the next window, not a pending UFA the club might lose while it tinkers with the bottom six. The same day the Devils signed Barrett Hayton of the Utah Mammoth to a one-year, $4.775 million offer sheet. Utah matched on July 8. The sheet cost New Jersey nothing but a week of leverage. If Utah had walked, the Devils would have added a 26-year-old center for a 2027 second. They did not get the player. They still demonstrated a willingness to use the CBA as a tool instead of waiting for the market to offer a center for free. That is a different front office than the one that spent the last three summers reacting.
July 15: Anthony Mantha, two years, $9.5 million. Mantha is not a retrieval specialist. His value is entries and finishing on a line that can get him the puck. He is a bet that the rush the staff wants to play will create chances a shooter can bury.
September 1: Luke Evangelista from Nashville for a conditional 2028 first (Colorado’s, already in the chain of conditions from the Nemec deal) and New Jersey’s 2028 second. Evangelista is 24. He just put up 12 goals and 44 assists in 81 games, 56 points, 16:37 a night. His even-strength Corsi was 57.5 percent. His five-on-five expected-goals share sat at 54 percent. His on-ice shot share was elite. He spent 47.6 percent of his time in the offensive zone. He is a pending restricted free agent next summer, which means the Devils control him for at least one more contract cycle if they want him. Paying a protected late first and a second for a 24-year-old winger who drives play and retrieves is the closest thing this summer produced to a high-upside hockey trade. It is also the closest thing to a statement that Mehta will spend future capital to fix the present floor.
Gritsyuk’s three-year, $9.75 million extension belongs in the same paragraph. The club did not treat a good rookie year as a one-off. They treated it as a middle-six piece they were not going to let walk into arbitration and out of town.
What “raising the floor” means in minutes, not slogans
A team’s floor is the quality of the 12th forward and the sixth defenseman on a Tuesday in January when Hughes has a lower-body issue and Pesce is on the shelf. Last year’s floor was Cotter, Tsyplakov, Bjugstad, Nemec on nights he was a liability, and whoever got called up from Utica. Those minutes produced the 16-23-1 half of the season.
Replace Cotter and Tsyplakov’s minutes with some combination of Rodrigues, Glass, Boqvist, Gritsyuk, Mercer, and Connor Brown, and the expected-goals share of the bottom two lines should stop looking like 35 percent. That does not require any of those players to become first-liners. It requires them to be actual NHL players in the skills that keep a shift from turning into a 30-second defensive-zone start. Retrieval first. Exit second. Entry third. The public work on tracking data this summer was blunt: the Devils had ranked in the bottom half of the league in defensive-zone retrievals for multiple years, and the incoming group is better at that specific job than the outgoing group. Evangelista is the clearest upgrade. Rodrigues and Boqvist are upgrades on the same axis. Chisholm exists because Mehta thinks the third pair can move pucks instead of icing them. If that is even half right, the Devils stop playing the version of hockey that made last winter feel endless.
On the back end the subtraction matters as much as the addition. Nemec’s 68 games were not empty. They were expensive in expected goals against and in the way they forced Luke and Siegenthaler into tougher usage. Taking those minutes off the board and replacing them with Chisholm, perhaps Morin in a depth role, a healthy Pesce, and eventually Anton Silayev in Utica rather than in a panic call-up is how a defense stops leaking without a star acquisition. Silayev, the 10th overall pick in 2024, signed his entry-level deal on June 1. He is 6-foot-7, 20 years old, and coming off a quiet KHL year offensively. The honest projection is a full year in Utica. The honest value is that the pipeline still has a potential shutdown piece after the club sold Nemec.
The cap is the other half of the floor. The ceiling for 2026-27 is $104 million. As of early September the Devils were projected around $102.15 million against the cap with about $1.85 million in current space and roughly $8.5 million in deadline space. That is tight. It is also a choice. Mehta spent the room on Evangelista, Mantha, Rodrigues, and the Hischier extension rather than sitting on $12 million and calling it flexibility. Look one year ahead and the picture changes. 2027-28 projects to more than $30 million in space once Hischier’s new deal kicks in and several mid-tier contracts expire. The club can be tight this year because it will not be tight next year. Deadline space of eight million is enough to add a rental if the standings in February look like a wild-card race instead of a first-round bye. Last year’s Devils did not have that option. They had Markstrom’s cap hit and Nemec’s next contract hanging over the same conversation.
Why 2026-27 should be a better Devils team, stated without incense
Start with the simplest regression. A 48.5 percent five-on-five team that got plus-14 goaltending from its backup and minus-8 from its starter is not an 87-point talent. It is a team whose true talent when healthy was a playoff team and whose true talent when thin was a playoff miss. Swap the negative WAR minutes for average-to-above-average NHL minutes and the point total should move even if Hughes misses another 15 games. That is the entire thesis. The Devils hope Hughes can play 82, but it’s no longer a requirement. It requires the 15 he misses to stop being a 0.413 points-percentage team.
Then look at the process. Meier and Hischier already generate a strong share together. Bratt is a plus driver over 82 games. Hughes, when he is himself, is a 98th-percentile impact player. Gritsyuk is a real piece. Evangelista just spent a season at 54 percent expected goals and 57.5 percent Corsi at even strength and should compliment the Hischier line well. Rodrigues can play center or wing and has already lived in a structure that values the unsexy parts of the game. If the five-on-five share moves from 48.5 toward 50 or 51, the standings move with it. That is not a projection model talking. That is how the league works when you stop handing the other team the last two minutes of every other period.
Goaltending is the quietest improvement by subtraction if Allen is merely average. He does not need another plus-14 season. He needs to not share the net with a starter who was a drag for 44 games. Rittich is a known NHL backup. Daws will finally get a legitimate shot in a period of time where he’s finally ready for the minutes coming to him. Luongo and Stewart are a different development chain than the one that produced last year’s split. If Allen regresses hard, the floor drops again. That is the honest risk. It is a smaller risk than last year’s tandem.
Luke is the swing on the blue line. He had a negative WAR last season, but was still a useful impact player and is still the best skating defenseman on the roster. A full year next to Pesce, with Brenden Dillon and Siegenthaler in defined roles and Chisholm as a seventh rather than an emergency starter is a different job than the one he had when Nemec was a regular and Pesce was hurt. Dougie Hamilton remains a $9 million second-pair piece who can still run a power play. The defense does not need to become elite. It needs to stop being the reason a 3-2 game becomes 4-3 in the other direction.
The Metropolitan Division will not cooperate. Carolina is still Carolina. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia made the playoffs last year. Washington was a 95-point team and improved mightily this offseason. The Devils do not get to play a soft schedule and call it growth. They also do not have to be the best team in the division to be a better team than they were in April. Eighty-seven points with this core, this cap, and this availability record was a failure of construction. The construction changed.
The remaining holes are real. Hughes has now missed significant time in three straight seasons — shoulder, shoulder, finger, a short lower-body absence before the Olympics. He is 24. The injury history is the largest unpriced variable in the organization, and no general manager can trade for a new set of joints. Allen is 36. Mantha has never been a two-way solution. Boqvist’s 13-point year is not a selling point. The 2028 first that went to Nashville is a real chip, even with the conditions attached. A 48.5 percent team does not automatically become a 52 percent team because the general manager used to work in Sunrise. Keefe’s second season here did not look like the transition team he coached in Toronto. If the exits do not improve, the staff change will look cosmetic by December.
Those caveats belong in the same piece as the optimism as they do not erase the work. Mehta sold a former second-overall pick who was sinking the defensive-zone process and turned him into two firsts. He sold a $6 million goaltender with negative GSAx and turned him into three forwards who can play. He spent a first and a second on a 24-year-old winger who drives play. He signed the captain. He extended the rookie who earned it. He used an offer sheet as a free look at a center. He hired the Florida people who already know how he wants a roster built. He kept the coach and changed the coaches around the coach.
The Devils have a young core that has now wasted two of the last three springs. Expectations for 2026-27 could be tricky. The Devils shouldn’t just expect to make the playoffs but make an impact in them. They should also expect to be the version of a team that exists when Hughes is out, they are no longer a bottom-10 club in disguise. If that is true, the standings take care of themselves more often than they did last winter. That is what a raised floor looks like in this league. Not a new identity. A refusal to keep running the same 12th forward and the same third pair and then acting surprised in April.
Analytics via Hockey Game Bot*