Better luck next year: What's holding the New Jersey Devils back?

The team on paper is still very good when it is healthy. It has not been consistently healthy the past two seasons.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs: The New Jersey Devils.

Every year there is usually one team going into the Stanley Cup Playoffs that you can just kind of tell is marching toward its inevitable first-round loss with zero belief around it. Maybe not zero belief among the players, but from those watching it or observing it.

This year the New Jersey Devils were that team.

The good news was they bounced back from a bitterly disappointing 2023-24 season and played their way back into the playoffs. Fixing their goaltending situation was a big part of that, as well finding a new voice behind the bench by going from Lindy Ruff to Sheldon Keefe. Getting some better injury luck in the first half of the season also helped quite a bit after the 2023-24 team was absolutely ravaged by major injuries all season.

But while the goaltending and coaching decisions paid off, the injury luck quickly ran out and once again left their lineup severely shorthanded for a significant part of the season.

• Jack Hughes, their best and most impactful player, suffered another major injury and not only missed the end of the regular season, but all of the playoffs.

• Defenseman Dougie Hamilton missed 18 games at the end of the season before finally returning for one regular season game and the playoffs. He was not anywhere near as effective as he was prior to the injury, or when he is 100 percent healthy and playing at his best.

• Another top defenseman, Jonas Siegenthaler, was limited to under 60 games for the second year in a row and also missed significant time at the end of the regular season before returning for three playoff games where he was also clearly not as effective as he normally is.

Those three injuries alone were pretty devastating to the Devils’ chances down the stretch. Yes, teams need depth, but there’s not many teams that are going to keep winning without their most dynamic forward and two of their top defensemen being healthy.

But is that all that is holding this Devils teams back?

Let’s talk about it.