With an already flawed roster, filled with holes, the New Jersey Devils can ill afford any more voids in personnel. In order to maintain, there’s one simple step on the table for newly appointed Devils General Manager, Sunny Mehta, re-signing Nico Hischier.
The Devils Captain is the ultimate Swiss Army knife and while a shake up of the core has been a demand from this fan base, it’s hard to justify that Hischier should be part of such.
The former first overall pick does it all for New Jersey. Nico is nearly a point per game player since entering the league. He is one of an elite group of NHLers to ever have 1,000+ faceoff wins in a season, winning 1,008 this past season. Hischier can skate, shoot, score, pass, defend, create, win board battles, lead(mostly by example), kill penalties, and contribute on the power play. The 27 year old Center man does all of the above at an elite level despite being tasked with shutting down the leagues top super stars. On many nights Nico has shutdown players such as Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid, Nikita Kucherov, and Auston Matthews all while finding ways to still create offense for his line.
Losing Nico would create nearly a dozen roster deficiencies for New Jersey. To fill such voids with one player would be virtually impossible. The only Center in all of hockey I could think of being capable of performing those tasks at such a high level would be Florida’s Sasha Barkov, who isn’t going anywhere. Which brings us to our next question, what should Nico’s next contract look like?
Barkov signed an 8 year, $80m deal with Florida back in 2022-23. At the time, Barkov was in a similar boat to Hischier, 27 years old, a 1,000 face off win season and close to a point per game output. Factoring in the much higher salary cap and Hischier’s overall value to the franchise a deal between $12-14m AAV seems to be where this is heading. A lot of fans will over react to such number, but this is a growing market with the cap expected to hit nearly $115m in the next few seasons, a seismic jump from the $95.5m cap this past season.
This is a deal that should get done about as easily as possible(which seems to not be too easy in the NHL these days). Sunny Mehta has a penchant for realizing value, and to find value in Hischier, one doesn’t have to dig too deeply. Hischier seems happy to be in New Jersey, despite some perhaps, agent driven comments at the end of the season which I wouldn’t read too far into.
So let’s see a Crosby-style contract for Nico, $13.13m x 7 years should be more than enough to get it done and avoid making a hole that cannot be filled.
Get it dunny, Sunny! Go gehta!