The Devils' Ideal 2025 Trade Deadline
The New Jersey Devils have a couple glaring holes in their lineup, and here's what they can do to fix it.
Currently, the Devils will have accrued a projected $5.58 million in trade deadline cap space. They also have two obvious needs as a team: top-six goalscoring and bottom-six offense. The defense is there, the coaching system is there, the goaltending is definitely there, and the star power is there. After a couple of moves, they can go from floundering to flourishing.
Enter GM JP Gambatese, who is here to 1) fix those issues, 2) do it while under the salary cap, and 3) do it without overspending and sacrificing the Devils’ future. A tall task, I know, but one I’m ready to take head-on.
Move #1: Send Kurtis MacDermid Down
Let’s be real here: Kurtis MacDermid provides exactly nothing to the Devils. He rarely plays, and when he does, he plays less than 10 minutes a night and gets hemmed in nearly 100% of the time. Players aren’t scared to play against him, and he takes needless penalties while looking like a lost puppy when he jumps off the bench. I don’t really care about his locker room presence. He is a net negative in the lineup and needs to be removed from it.
Thankfully, his contract can be fully buried in the AHL. Move #1 of my perfect NHL Deadline is to send him to the waiver wire. In an ideal world, someone would take him as he passes through waivers and saves the Devils from themselves, taking his $1.15 million cap hit for this and the next two seasons off the books. If that doesn’t happen, burying his contract in the minors works well enough.
After this move, the Devils will have $7.42 million in trade deadline space.
Move #2: Ryan Donato
The Value: Donato, by just about all measures, has been one of Chicago’s best players this season. He’s leading the Blackhawks with 19 goals and is third on the team with 37 points. They’re likely looking for draft capital rather than a hockey trade.
The Devils have three second-round selections in this year’s draft, and quite frankly, they shouldn’t use a single one of them at the draft. For a bottom-six offensive contributor at a reasonable $1 million cap hit (at half-retention), this is a reasonable ask and one that GM Tom Fitzgerald should have no problem with.
The Fit: The Devils’ bottom-six is chock-full of defense-first players. Even Paul Cotter, who has some of the highest raw skill on the team (but doesn’t have the IQ to make it work all the time), is more defense-oriented than offensively inclined this season. Donato, meanwhile, leaves a bit of defensive aptitude to be desired but instead is one of the better bottom-six playdrivers available at this year’s trade deadline.
I know I harped on the Devils’ bottom six for not having much speed, and Donato doesn’t have much of it, but that’s what Move #3 is for. He shoots all the time, which, considering that much of the bottom half of the lineup is allergic to it, would be an asset.
Really, his defensive work is just barely below average. He would pair nicely alongside any one of the defensive-minded players in the Devils’ bottom six, and those defensive deficiencies would quickly go away. As is visible from his RAPM chart, which is as good an individual metric as we have access to, he is a moderate offensive boost who drives play at an effective clip despite playing in Chicago.
His playdriving stems from his ability to retrieve loose pucks in the defensive zone. He is effective and efficient at doing so, and he is able to get quick passes to his open teammates, spring into the neutral zone, and receive a give-and-go pass with a controlled zone entry. This theoretically meshes well with Sheldon Keefe’s system, which prioritizes short, methodical passes in the defensive zone rather than potentially risky stretch passes (at the expense of high-octane rush offense generation). Beyond that, he is a rebound hound, being able to generate a ton of chaos in front of the opposing goaltender. He is also a plus on the forecheck. It makes a lot of sense from just about all standpoints.
Move #3: Jake Evans
The Value: According to Elliotte Friedman on the 32 Thoughts Podcast, the Canadiens are reportedly looking for a second-round pick in exchange for the 28-year-old. Being that the Devils desperately need bottom-six help, that they have three second-rounders, and that Evans is performing at a career-high point pace, I don’t think the Devils have any issue with sending this value over.
The Fit: Here is the fix for the Devils’ lack of speed — specifically in the bottom six — which has neutered their offense in many ways. Acquiring Evans is a good step towards amending that. According to NHL Edge, he ranks in the 93rd percentile for top speed and in the 91st percentile for speed bursts of 20 or more mph:
I’ve admittedly been shaky about the prospect of acquiring Evans — the Devils have been rumored to have been on him for much of the season — considering he’s in the midst of a career year and an unsustainable shooting percentage, but I’ve come around on him simply because he’s so fast.
He’s a plus on both sides of the ice, limiting shot volume against with an active stick and high motor while providing a spark to the Canadiens’ bottom six. His tracked rush offensive game is lacking this season for some strange reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I think his speed and acceleration would lend themselves to better results in that regard with better talent around him.
Move #4: Rickard Rakell
The Value: I’m sure you’re not thrilled to see Seamus Casey in the deal, but let’s take a step back for a second and look at the Devils’ blue line as a whole. They couldn’t fit their number-one prospect Simon Nemec into the lineup until stalwart defenseman Jonas Siegenthaler went down with an ugly injury. Fitzgerald just spent the 10th overall selection on another left-handed defenseman, and one who projects as a true minute-muncher at that. With Luke Hughes, Dougie Hamilton, and Simon Nemec already in the lineup as strong puck-movers, there isn’t really a need for Casey to be anything but a trade chip (unless he moves to center, which I unironically believe he should do). His value is decently high, and the Devils would be smart to send him in a package for a top-six-caliber winger.
Pittsburgh has made it public that their goal is to get younger. Penguins GM Kyle Dubas said he was looking for NHL-ready youngsters to build around, citing Philip Tomasino as his example. Casey is arguably NHL-ready, and at the very least will be by the start of next season. He’s already a productive AHLer on a weak Utica Comets team.
Casey alone almost definitely won’t do it for Pittsburgh, though, considering that Rakell is and has been a productive member of their top six and is pacing for a 35-plus goal 2024-25. As much as it’s fun to overvalue the prospects within one’s favorite team, the reality is that Casey alone isn’t going to net a stud. That’s where the second-round pick comes in. The Devils’ second-rounder is going to be a late one, too.
Edit: The 2025 Devils’ second-rounder is off-limits unless conditions are placed on it that say if Jake Allen reaches the 40-game threshold (which would send the second to Montréal), the pick moves to 2026.
The inclusion of Nathan Bastian and Tomas Tatar serves two purposes: cap dumps and an increase in offense in the bottom six. Both of them have been defensively sound, to say the least, but have combined for just 21 points in 90 games. Tatar, at 34 years old, has served his purpose in being an everyday fourth-line grinder and is treated here as a pure cap dump. Bastian is the more interesting case, being that he’s still around his peak age (27) and probably genuinely has some on-ice value. His $1.4 million off the books is nice, but there is a player that could possibly be perceived as useful to the Penguins’ future — that’s where the fifth-round draft pick coming back to New Jersey fits in.
Fitting in Rakell’s deal was a bit trickier than Evans' or Donato's because it’s nigh-impossible to imagine a world in which any retention gets put into a trade. He is signed for three more seasons after 2024-25, and no team in the NHL is going to want to retain $2.5 million for that long.
If Siegenthaler gets moved to LTIR, the Devils will have a few more dollars to use. The way that LTIR works is that a team’s LTIR Pool is the difference between an LTIR player’s cap hit minus the team’s available cap space — the example that PuckPedia uses is that if a team has $100,000 in cap space and sends a player with a cap hit of $4 million to LTIR, the team gains ($4 million - $100,000 = $3.9 million) in cap space that they are able to use. For this exercise, I’m going to assume that Siegenthaler’s prognosis from the European news outlet that broke his surgery news is correct and he’ll only miss “weeks,” so I’m deciding to ignore the LTIR pool for this.
The Fit: Rakell has been one of the league’s better wingers this season, and it’s not often that players like that come available, especially ones with term. This season, he’s played alongside Sidney Crosby in an expanded role and has performed admirably, putting up 25 goals and 48 total points in 56 games. No offense to the all-time great Crosby, but Jack is a better playmaking center at this point in their respective careers and Bratt is right there with them in terms of their abilities to take over a game.
His top speed is slow, but he accelerates to said top speed extremely quickly. He shoots a ton and shoots hard. For a team that needs to be quicker and shoot more, he’s the perfect fit based solely on his NHL Edge profile.
Beyond that, the Devils also need a finisher who can pot more goals than he’s expected to. They have players performing well below this level in this regard, so it’s time to beef up the firepower. Rakell is no exception to this, scoring 25 goals on 20.12 ixG. He has scored more goals than expected in most campaigns of his career.
To me, his microstats scream as the ideal complement to the transitional monsters and playmakers that Jack and Bratt are. Rakell doesn’t care much for taking the puck into the O-zone himself, instead deferring to Crosby and Bryan Rust to do so this season. Jack and Bratt can obviously handle that role. Instead, Rakell is content to be the third forward back and has shown an adept ability to find open space, being in the right place at the right time to capitalize on a high-danger pass. He is a dangerous player in the slot, and won’t need to retrieve the puck in the defensive zone (which is his biggest deficiency) with Jack and Bratt as his linemates and a stronger blueline than he’s ever played for behind him.
Final Result
5v5
With those three trades made, the Devils’ lineup looks drastically different, and a lot more potent from an offensive standpoint:
All of a sudden, the Devils have a winger pacing for 35-plus goals playing next to Jack and Bratt, and their bottom six is completely revamped with increased speed and scoring capabilities. Their center depth, with Erik Haula dropping down to the fourth line and Curtis Lazar being the injury replacement, goes from a point of weakness to a source of strength. When Siegenthaler returns, Nemec can slide back to the AHL. Let’s go line-by-line:
Rickard Rakell - Jack Hughes - Jesper Bratt
Hughes and Bratt should be stapled together for the duration of their contracts — they truly are offensive dynamos together by every sense of the term. Adding Rakell, a career plus-finisher with term on his contract, should be a scoring boost for PB&J for several seasons. Rakell’s ability to shoot quickly off of high-danger passes would be an asset to the quick-thinking, perfect-passing duo. He, in my opinion, is the perfect passenger for them.
Timo Meier - Nico Hischier - Dawson Mercer
I know that I’ve said that Meier operates at his best when he is driving his own line — and I do think that it’s the truth — but it would probably be more effective from a team-building standpoint to overload the top-six with talent. Meier has proven to be an effective linemate to just about everyone in the Red and Black, and the captain is no exception. Mercer, meanwhile, has proven that he can play well when alongside competent playdrivers (he can’t drive play on his own, but is an effective complement), and in this scenario, he has two extremely strong ones. He and Meier have churned out exceptional underlying metrics together, and it’s about high time that Sheldon Keefe paired them up.
Paul Cotter - Jake Evans - Ryan Donato
I think this has the capability to be an extremely fun third line. On one hand, Cotter has extremely strong defensive metrics this season and Evans has proven that he can be a two-way asset. On the other, Evans has exactly what the Devils’ bottom six needs: speed and acceleration to provide legitimate chances off the rush. He and Cotter are both explosive skaters who can theoretically generate offense in odd-man opportunities when the opportunity arises. Donato is a plus-finisher whose bread and butter is being in the right place at the right time — if he’s the third forward into the zone in this situation, he can easily pot home a rebound off of the rush opportunity. Beyond that, all three players have proven to be effective at cyclical offense, too: Cotter is adept at retrieving pucks off of dump-ins and pressuring defenders on the forecheck; Evans too is an aggressive and effective forechecker and has the speed to retrieve loose pucks; Donato is a rebound machine who preys on netfront chaos. It’s a recipe for success.
Ondrej Palat - Erik Haula - Stefan Noesen
Ah, to have the league’s most expensive fourth line. Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not in love with this line, but I do think it has potential. Outside of Noesen, Haula and Palat have had rough seasons and could make use of some softer minutes. As much as I’ve ragged on them both, it’s hard for me to imagine a world in which they’re not able to generate anything when playing against weak competition. At worst, they’re all defensively responsible veterans, so they probably wouldn’t be allowing much against them, even if they’re slow and generally unskilled.
Power Play
The first power play unit should remain unchanged unless someone goes down with an injury. It’s been the most effective power play in the league by far this season in terms of underlying chance and xG generation and certainly shouldn’t go anywhere anytime soon.
The change would happen in the second unit:
Looks a lot more threatening than the Devils’ current second unit, right? Instead of Palat and Tatar, it’s now Rakell and Donato. This gives the Devils four legitimate scorers in terms of the forward group and a sneaky-good zone entry threat in Donato. In my mind, Meier and Rakell are on the flanks for one-timers and cross-crease passers, Mercer is in the bumper by proxy of his lightning-fast trigger and ability to rip the puck while crowded by a defenseman, and Donato is the netfront presence as the second-best blue-paint chaos goblin on the team. I genuinely think this would be the best second unit in the league.
It’s Time for Trades
I think the current Devils team is a very good hockey club with a flaw or two. There are ebbs and flows to an 82-game season, and that includes stretches where great teams look middling and middling teams look great — that’s just how the game goes. New Jersey is certainly mired in one of those stretches, but the silver lining is that it has exposed a couple of issues that can be addressed via outside sources.
The bottom-six jumpstart should be the #1 priority, in my opinion. I understand the argument that they’re not losing their matchups, but I’m certain that the team as a whole would be better off if there wasn’t so much pressure on the top six to carry the vast majority of the scoring burden.
Beyond that, a complement to Jack and Bratt who isn’t named Ondrej Palat needs to get done. I’m sick and tired of having to watch Palat ruin possessions that PB&J started. Adding an offensively competent player who can pot a couple of extra goals (at an above-expected rate, specifically) should be on the docket.
The time is now, while the core is entering its prime, to full-send trades with Stanley Cup aspirations. There are no longer any excuses.
I love it, those are exactly the players I want, and reasonable prices for all of them.
The one thing I don't like is I feel Noesen would be wasted on that 4th line, but he could easily be switched with Mercer when Mercer is slumping.