I admit I wasn’t following the Devils enough in the preseason to know much of anything other than the seemingly neverending Luke Hughes contract speculation, which finally ended a few days ago when the young defenseman signed a much-anticipated seven-year $63 million deal. It wasn’t the eight years which would have been slightly more optimal from a team perspective, nor was it the five years which would have been the nightmare scenario (lining Luke’s contract to end the same year as brother Jack’s). Proving once again we speculate on negotiations and know nothing, it came out afterwards apparently Luke and his agent wanted a six-year deal throughout the process. Be that as it may, at least a compromise was reached before the camp holdout cost the team any games of Luke’s services in the regular season.

It’s likely because I haven’t been following that I’m having trouble finding a starting point for my season preview blog. Might as well start it with…the start of the season, a not-so-easy three game road trip through Carolina, Tampa and Columbus before our first home game against what’s left of the two-time champion Panthers (following a devastating season-long injury to Aleksander Barkov, and the LTIR absence of Matthew Thachuk) next Thursday for the home opener. Hopefully we’ll get some points on the road and the crowd – including me – won’t be in an antagonistic mood.

In what’s a first for me since the SportsChannel days, I won’t be able to watch the opening game of the season on basic TV. The fact that the Devils’ season opener is on Hulu/ESPN plus streaming should annoy me – but given we’re just going back to the house of horrors where our last season ended, perhaps it’ll just save me from unnecessary angst the first game in this season. I could just listen to the radio telecast but I can’t legitimately remember the last time the Devils played well when I listened to the radio so that’s probably out too.

Anyhoo, let’s get into the actual makeup of the team itself – which really hasn’t changed since early free agency to be honest.

You’ve heard of the term soft quitting in recent years, it seems like the entire NHL soft quit doing business after the free agency frenzy once everyone got a boatload of fresh cap space this offseason with the promise of more still to come. Pretty much nothing at all changed on defense or in net, with Jake Allen having returned on basically a lifetime contract in July, with talks of an extension for starter Jacob Markstrom now being rumored. Guess we’ve seen the last of Nico Daws, waived and now in Utica for the time being as he and any of the other young goalies will only be injury fill-ins for the foreseeable future.

Admittedly. when we had an older than dirt Martin Brodeur and Johan Hedberg as our goaltending tandem I didn’t worry too much about the age factor then – but it was hard to given Marty’s generational durability and the win-now nature of that group anyway. I’m a little more concerned about pushing all our chips to the middle of the table on two 35+ year olds now, even if the young goalie depth is much better on paper than it was during the end of the Lou era. Plus, let’s be honest it’s not like Markstrom and Allen were totally lockdown last year anyway. They weren’t disasterrific – but definitely inconsistent at times – and you never know when the injury bug will bite as it did for Markstrom in January last year.

On defense, most of the camp consternation was about Luke’s contract, but with that done we return to the same picture we had in July, albeit one now clouded even more for young Seamus Casey, as a long-term injury pretty much rules him out of the next few weeks at least. It does appear that the starting six are pretty well set on paper with Simon Nemec getting his last, best chance to nail down a starting spot here with Jonathan Kovacevic still nowhere close to a return. Shockingly, after all the talk about a possible career-ending injury in last year’s playoffs (and one detailed by the player himself in camp) Brenden Dillon will once again be one of the six when the puck drops in Raleigh.

For the moment, all of Dillon, Jonas Siegenthaler and Dougie Hamilton are healthy to start last season after varying injury issues marred the end of last season in all three cases. While stability is a good thing for the most part, I’m still not sure this blueline has enough transition to keep pace with younger, faster teams. Perhaps Nemec will help with that, and maybe a healthy Hamilton can have one last vintage bounceback season, before cap and roster crunch issues could force a move next offseason. While defensively we were solid for the most part, including with half a defense in the playoffs, we just didn’t get enough offensively from the blueline last year and Hamilton’s struggles with Luke’s inconsistency and a lack of help around them was a big reason why.

Up front has been where the most change has happened this offseason, to the point where I even forgot about Connor Brown being a part of the mix now. I did already talk about him and the other FA adds in my previous blog about free agency so I won’t really add anything else on him or Evgenii Dadonov, and neither of them are the most intriguing new face on the block anyway. To me I’m most looking forward to seeing 24-year old Arseny Gritsyuk, who’s come off like the real-life Russian version of Dani Rojas in the Ted Lasso series, a ball of positivity and fun who also has some talent too.

It does appear as if Gritsyuk will start on the fourth line with Paul Cotter, as the two reportedly had chemistry in camp but we’ll see how long that last and whether Gritsyuk can earn his way higher up the food chain or at least be a big upgrade over the fourth liners we were running in and out last year.

Of course, we’ll ride or die mostly on the health and contributions of the big four up front – Jack Hughes, Nico Hischier, Jesper Bratt and Timo Meier, even if the latter is still a bit too inconsistent for my liking. But what can you really say about any of them now? We hope they stay healthy and are as productive as possible, great. In a sense the same can be said for Dawson Mercer, but he’s got a bit more to prove after two down years following a great sophomore season, and with GM Tom Fitzgerald reportedly calling him out for not being strong enough physically. A breakout from Mercer would certainly help the secondary scoring issue.

Speaking of Fitz, there isn’t much to say on the GM either…if he’s not on the hot seat this year he probably should be, at the very least this team needs to make the playoffs without any of the angst they had in the second half of last year. It was embarrassing having the Devils slog it out with the likes of Cinderella Columbus and fresh-faced Montreal for the last spot, little did I know that would be just an appetizer for what the Mets would pull later on, but I digress. The Devils have underperformed expectations for two straight years now since their breakout 2022-23 season and need to take a step forward this season, not just in making the playoffs but at least win a round and get back to the 2022-23 level. What they should, and will do might be two different things though. I’m not here to make predictions, too much is going to happen between now and April for that.

Admittedly it’s been hard for me to get into the Devils thus far, and I’m not sure how often I’ll be blogging going forward. Part of it is sports related, after the disaster that was the end of the Mets season followed by the entire Jets season piled onto the Devils’ own second half mini-collapse last year (as bad as our second half was, the Mets topped it so spectacularly I can’t even call what the Devils pulled from early January on a collapse anymore) has me a bit bleh on sports at the moment. I just don’t have the excitement that needs to be there to maintain any kind of regular correspondence, not even taking into account non-sports stuff I need to address – mainly my next full-time job/career.

I did want to do this blog both as a vehicle to get myself more into the upcoming Devils season and as one to inform any readers (including Derek) that I’m unfortunately just not sure how often I’ll be doing blogs this season. My loose plan is to maybe post a monthly recap of the team and goings on at the arena, plus whenever something major happens with the Devils in the regular season and possibly get into it more frequently as the playoffs approach but I don’t want to lock into that or anything else at the moment. My next blog could be two weeks from now, or two months, or never. While part of me does want to keep up some form of a Devils recap, I just don’t want to do this by rote, and at times especially the last couple of years it felt like I have.

Anyway, that’s enough of my indulgence…Happy Hockey Season everyone!