Lessons the Devils can Learn from True Cup Contenders

The New Jersey Devils would be wise to take some advice from the real contenders for the Stanley Cup

Once again, I wanted to thank everyone for the monumental support this season, particularly those of you who are following along on a daily basis. I made the leap to running this blog instead of my usual work at The Hockey Writers about three months ago, and the amount of support I’ve received has been incredible. My goal with this has always been to make it a haven for Devils fans who appreciate the finer details, without the need to pay anything. It’s a pleasure waking up early every morning to get these done, and seeing the support on here and on Twitter (and Bluesky!) has meant the world. Thank you.

With that in mind, if you’re continuing to enjoy the content I’m putting out on a near-daily basis, consider sharing this publication with friends, family, and any Devils fans you know. I want to make this a home for as many people as possible.

Again, thank you.

---

It’s been more than a day since the New Jersey Devils were eliminated from the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs, but in their exit interviews, they made it clear that their aspirations as a Cup contender still hold strong for next season and beyond.

If they truly want to make that jump, one that I think most people were anticipating to be the case this season, they can use to take a few lessons from past Stanley Cup winners and the current contenders for the Cup this season.

I’m going to say that there are seven really legit teams this season with a real shot at the Stanley Cup: the Florida Panthers, Vegas Golden Knights, Colorado Avalanche, Dallas Stars, Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, and Carolina Hurricanes. You’ll notice I excluded the Toronto Maple Leafs (whose underlying statistical profile leads me to believe they’re going to fall quite easily to the Panthers) and the Washington Capitals (who rode to the position they’re in on the backs of an unsustainable shooting percentage and unbelievable goaltending, and didn’t look like they were truly a gigantic step above the Montreal Canadiens).

On the whole, I do think that there is a general overadjustment from teams around the NHL in attempts to “copy” the Cup-winning teams, but there truly are some valuable lessons to take away from them. Without wasting any more time, let’s talk about those lessons:

---

1. Prioritize the Current Window

The number one lesson that the Devils — specifically GM Tom Fitzgerald — can learn from recent Cup winners and the upper echelon of teams this postseason is that futures just don’t matter once you’re established. The Devils, having made the postseason in two of the past three seasons and only missing last year because of goaltending (which was solved) and untimely injuries, are established.

Patience is for rebuilding teams. The Devils, with a solidified core (Jack Hughes, Nico Hischier, Jesper Bratt, Timo Meier, Luke Hughes) and a stellar defense corps locked up long-term, are not a rebuilding team.

When you take a look at who I defined as a true Cup contender, you can see a commonality in that they all have prioritized win-now pieces over potential future success. They identified their respective core age window and built their teams accordingly.

The correct philosophy here is: if the Devils are Cup contenders (which they are), why wait around for futures to hit when you can build around the core you already have? Trade them away for players who can and will make an immediate positive impact.

The Florida Panthers traded away Spencer Knight, a 2026 1st, a 2027 2nd, and a 2026 4th for Seth Jones, Brad Marchand, and Nico Sturm. They don’t have a single pick in the first three rounds of the 2025 draft because they used them at previous deadlines. The Vegas Golden Knights had a quiet deadline but still traded away one of their top young talents in Brendan Brisson, as well as a 3rd rounder, for Reilly Smith. They aren’t picking in the first round of the next two drafts by proxy of previous moves they’ve made.

The Dallas Stars traded away their next three first-round draft picks, Logan Stankoven, 3rd-rounders in 2026 and 2027, and a 4th in this year’s draft to acquire Mikko Rantanen, Mikael Granlund, and Cody Ceci. Obviously, Rantanens aren’t available every season, but the point is that they identified that their core is in contention mode and made two gigantic moves to build around it.

The Devils, meanwhile, have three prime trade chips on the back-end in Simon Nemec, Anton Silayev, and Seamus Casey. One or both of Nemec and Casey seemed destined to be on the move, considering that the Devils have Dougie Hamilton, Brett Pesce, and Johnathan Kovacevic locked up for at least the next three seasons on the right side. Silayev is still several years out from being an NHL-ready player, and what’s the use there? Even the forward pieces within the system should be fair game (perhaps with the exception of Arseni Gritsyuk, who is more NHL-ready than any Devils prospect and should be an impact piece next year and beyond).

More than anything, this applies to draft picks. The Devils shouldn’t be drafting in the first round of any draft until Jack is no longer playing in their uniform — that is the correct way to go about things. Even their second-rounders and third-rounders should be used as trade fodder over actually using them. The Pittsburgh Penguins did that well when their core was in its prime, as did the Tampa Bay Lightning, as do all of the teams currently competing for the Cup and the past Cup winners. The Devils would be wise to adopt this strategy. The time for conservative moves for the sake of preserving future assets is gone.

2. Skill Over Everything

People love to point out how “gritty” the teams that win are, but it’s always a convenient argument with that crowd — when the team is playing well, they’re playing grittily, and when the team is underperforming, they’re labeled as soft. It’s the classic goalpost-moving argument that is oh-so-tiring to discuss, but unequivocally true.

The overarching theme in all of these teams is that there is legit skill up and down the lineup. The Devils have the core to follow suit, with the important Devils’ forwards matching up well against the best of the best in terms of sheer ability. A quintessential landmark for a contending team is star power, and the Devils certainly aren’t short of that.

What the contenders do have that the Devils don’t is a ton of skill in the bottom six. Here is a list of all of the contenders I listed in the introduction and the previous three Cup winners, and who they have/had listed in the bottom six:

Current teams:
Florida Panthers: Brad Marchand, Anton Lundell, Eetu Luostarainen, Jesper Boqvist
Vegas Golden Knights: William Karlsson, Ivan Barbashev, Reilly Smith
Colorado Avalanche: Charlie Coyle, Jonathan Drouin, Ross Colton (when healthy), Jack Drury, Logan O’Connor
Dallas Stars: Wyatt Johnston, Jamie Benn, Evgenii Dadonov, Mikael Granlund
Edmonton Oilers: Viktor Arvidsson, Adam Henrique, Vasily Podkolzin
Winnipeg Jets: Adam Lowry, Nino Niederreiter
Carolina Hurricanes: Logan Stankoven, Eric Robinson, Jack Roslovic

Past Cup winners:
Florida Panthers, 2024: Evan Rodrigues, Anton Lundell, Eetu Luostarainen, Vladimir Tarasenko
Vegas Golden Knights, 2023: William Karlsson, Ivan Barbashev, Phil Kessel, Reilly Smith
Colorado Avalanche, 2022: Andre Burakovsky, JT Compher, Artturi Lehkonen, Logan O’Connor

You get the point.

The Devils, meanwhile, don’t have remotely that much skill in their bottom six. Paul Cotter has raw talent but is unrefined by virtue of his supremely low hockey IQ. Cody Glass does have skill, but even that is somewhat limited unless he finds the gear that he had when he was drafted 6th overall. Daniel Sprong is skilled, but I’m unsure of how much the Devils want to bring him back. Tomas Tatar used to be much more skilled than he is now, but has been relegated to a position where a dump-and-chase, grinder style of play is more his speed.

If the Devils really want to compete, looking at the list above, they should really be aiming for ~4 skilled players in the bottom six. Not whatever was going on in the back half of the season.

3. Have a Puck Moving Defense

As I’ve alluded to recently, puck movement from the back end on the Devils’ blue line is a problem; one which was particularly exposed when L. Hughes went down in the first game.

The previous Cup winners and (the vast majority of) current contenders all have one thing in common: there are at least three legit puck-moving defensemen. Take a look at the list below:

Current teams:
Florida Panthers: Aaron Ekblad, Seth Jones, Gustav Forsling
Vegas Golden Knights: Shea Theodore, Noah Hanifin, Alex Pietrangelo
Colorado Avalanche: Cale Makar, Devon Toews, Sam Girard, Sam Malinski
Dallas Stars: Thomas Harley, Miro Heiskanen (when healthy)
Edmonton Oilers: Evan Bouchard, Jake Walman, John Klingberg, Matias Ekholm (when healthy)
Winnipeg Jets: Josh Morrissey, Neal Pionk, Dylan Samberg
Carolina Hurricanes: Brent Burns, Shayne Gostisbehere, Dmitry Orlov, Jalen Chatfield

Past Cup winners:
Florida Panthers, 2024: Brandon Montour, Aaron Ekblad, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Gustav Forsling
Vegas Golden Knights, 2023: Shea Theodore, Alex Pietrangelo
Colorado Avalanche, 2022: Cale Makar, Devon Toews, Sam Girard, Bowen Byram

Out of the seven current contenders I listed and the last three Cup winners, only two teams have had fewer than three puck-moving defensemen: the current Dallas Stars and the 2022-23 Vegas Golden Knights. Both of those teams’ two puck-moving defensemen are unequivocally elite at doing so, too, which I think neutralizes that point a bit.

The Devils, meanwhile, have two true puck-movers in the everyday lineup when everyone is healthy: L. Hughes and Dougie Hamilton. In the system, they have Simon Nemec and Seamus Casey, but the future is questionable at best with both of those guys. Brian Dumoulin stepped into a significant role in New Jersey after the trade deadline, and he was solid enough at moving the puck from the back end as well, but there’s certainly no guarantee that he’s back in the black and red for 2025-26.

Jonas Siegenthaler, Johnathan Kovacevic, and Brett Pesce are all stalwart defenders who don’t want the puck on their sticks. Brenden Dillon is neither a stalwart defender nor a puck-mover, and is who I would label as the team’s weak link on the back-end.

To me, this means they need to find a way to make it so that there are three puck-moving defensemen in the lineup, however that may come about. It’s a near-non-negotiable, in my opinion. The contenders and previous Cup winners would probably agree.

4. Play to the Team’s Strength

In 2022-23, what made the Devils such a dangerous team was their focus on rush hockey. They prioritized skill and speed, and generated as many rush opportunities as humanly possible. This worked wonders for both the offense and defense, with the Devils’ offense having scored the fourth-most goals in the league and the defense having extremely impressive underlying statistics by virtue of 1) actually being talented and 2) being in the other zone so often that their defensive numbers looked great. Over the next two seasons, there was a gradual change in the mentality that the team was too “soft” and needed to be “harder to play against.” The Devils had some notable exits off their roster who contributed to that identity of rush play off of speed, losing the likes of Damon Severson, Jesper Boqvist, Miles Wood (who is awful but extraordinarily fast and rush-oriented), Michael McLeod (who is an awful person), and John Marino. In their stead, over time, the team has gotten significantly slower and largely less skill-oriented, instead pouring their focus into being “grittier.”

That has left the Devils in a bit of a limbo, where their best players are speedy, skilled, and best suited for a rush-oriented lineup, but their complementary forwards are built for grittiness and dumping and chasing. On the back-end, they have L. Hughes as their building block — and the understanding that eventually, Q. Hughes will be on the team as well — and Dougie Hamilton, who plays a style of hockey fitting for the core players, but the rest of their blue line is a bit out of place, prioritizing crease-clearing rather than crease-clearing-and-then-puck-moving. It’s a juxtaposition that just doesn’t work as well as it would if everyone was on the same page.

Cup contenders and Cup winners prove that you have to commit, rather than stringing your players along two different playstyles.

Every team I mentioned holds this ideology, but I’d like to zero in on a few in particular. The Colorado Avalanche, Carolina Hurricanes, and Florida Panthers are great examples of what I’ll refer to as “committing to the bit.” Both teams have lineups built for the style of hockey they want to play, and they execute it flawlessly.

The Avalanche are built similarly to the 2022-23 Devils, in the sense that they have a hard focus on speed and skill, relentlessly pounding their opposition with downhill attacking shift after shift. When things are clicking for the Avs, the entire game is spent in the offensive zone because other teams simply cannot catch up. The horses of the team are obviously Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar, who really drove home the need to cater the lineup around this style of play because of how good they are, and the Avalanche front office smartly obliged. Shipping off Mikko Rantanen, who didn’t really fit that style of play but instead played passenger to MacKinnon, in exchange for Martin Necas, who fits the personality of the Avalanche roster to a T and has blossomed into a much better player since getting moved, was perfect asset management and displayed a perfect understanding of “committing to the bit.” Beyond that, they solved their depth issues with speedy, skilled players like Brock Nelson, Charlie Coyle, and Jack Drury. Their entire lineup, top to bottom, forwards to defense, is built upon the idea that if you simply cannot catch them with the puck, you’re going to lose. Hell, even Miles Wood, who has been atrocious through and through, fits the identity that the Avalanche want to have throughout their roster.

The Panthers are certainly skilled — undoubtedly more so than the Devils’ current complexion — but they build their lineup around a commitment to playing heavy hockey. Their team is slow, physical, on the line of clean and dirty, and leans almost exclusively on dumping and chasing. Their stars are stars and can obviously contribute to the rare odd-man rush for them, but for the vast majority of the time, they’re playing retrieval hockey in the o-zone before settling into a cycle. As such, they’ve prioritized acquiring players who fit this bill — moving Johnathan Huberdeau for Matt Tkachuk; acquiring Sam Bennett; trading for Brad Marchand this past deadline; drafting Anton Lundell. There are more things they’ve done to build this personality in their roster and have catered their playstyle to fit that bill.

The Hurricanes are probably the least skilled of the three teams mentioned, but their players were hand-selected to participate in the style of hockey that Rod Brind’Amour wants to play. Much like the Panthers, the Hurricanes are centered around a dump-and-chase system. The difference lies in the aggression they have in their forecheck and defensive zone coverage. Brind’Amour’s system states that in order to be successful, all three forwards must be belligerent on the forecheck to the point where, if things go wrong, the opposition can counter. His system also states that in the defensive zone, players must hound the puck carrier in man-to-man coverage with all their might in order to force a turnover as quickly as possible. Their lineup is tailor-made for both of these styles of play, with every single player in the Hurricanes’ forward corps having an affinity for forechecking and aggression, and every single player in the organization period being proficient in stick checks and defensive awareness.

The Devils need to pick a path. Tom Fitzgerald seemed content to split the strengths of the team in half, and that’s cost them offensive output more than anything else. To win, one must score goals, and to score goals, one must operate in a system that works for them. The Devils selected their core. Keefe is an adaptive coach who can cater his system to meet the needs of either a rush-oriented team or a dump-and-chase team. Now, it’s time to build around them with players that suit their style. If it were up to me, and I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone, the Devils would take a route similar to the Avalanche. Their core forwards are built to play that style of hockey, as is their most promising core defenseman. Why not fully “commit to the bit” like the contenders have?

---

The Devils, in my opinion, should take these dogmas to heart. Rather than adopting the playstyle or roster construction of the winners themselves, they should instead embrace the operations that got them there and put every other contender in the position they ended up in: prioritizing the current window, embracing skill over everything, putting together a defense corps that can move the puck well, and “committing to the bit.”

Those four principles are the recipe for success.