The Devils blue line will be a strength this season.

When the Devils line up on opening night for the start of the 2022-23 NHL season, they’ll do so with the best blue line the team has boasted (on paper) since… well, it’s been a long time. Actually, I think this year’s version of the Devils defense will be very good and has a chance to be one of the strongest units in the league if everyone stays healthy.

This may seem like a bold statement considering the team’s only additions to the current roster are John Marino and Brendan Smith, and neither of them will even come close to smelling Norris’s conversation next year. However, these additions only further bolster the depth of a unit that Fitzgerald has completely remade over the past two seasons. The rotation in a professional sports team is usually quite regular, especially when the team in question is bad. Still, it’s worth noting how quickly GM Tom Fitzgerald swapped a blue line from a unit of Severson, Greene, Vatanen, Subban, Mueller and Butcher in the 2019-20 season (Shero’s last as GM) to current group. by Siegenthaler, Hamilton, Severson, Graves, Marino, and Smith. While both Shero and Fitzgerald have primarily looked outside the organization to bolster the blue line, Fitzgerald has done a much better job of acquiring talent than his predecessor, in part because of the opportunity (Hamilton), in part because he simply did smarter bets (Siegenthaler vs. Mueller), and partly just plain dumb luck (Subban’s rapid decline, Siegenthaler’s rise). Regardless, the result is that the Devils now have arguably the deepest right side in the league with 3 top-4 caliber defensemen, including one of the best blue-liners in the league in Dougie Hamilton.

So let’s take a closer look at the unit.

As I mentioned earlier, the unit starts with star defenseman Dougie Hamilton. Although the 29-year-old free-agent acquisition is coming off a rather forgettable (for him) season in which he failed to hit double-digit goals for the first time since his freshman year and it was simply played a higher matchmaking level instead of a star level, we still have a glimpse of what he can do when he’s healthy and in his prime at the start of last season, before a series of injuries seemingly derailed his season. I suspect we will see a better version of Hamilton next year.

What I really want to see is a full season of a superior Siegenthaler-Hamilton pairing. While Hamilton is known for being an offensive powerhouse, Siegenthaler is the opposite.

The Devils had been missing a top-level defender since the decline of Andy Greene, and while Siegenthaler doesn’t get the job done in the same way Greene does, last season’s performance was as impressive as anything we’ve seen from Greene in his career. best moment. It’s a shame that it happened in such a forgettable year for the team as a whole. If you think I’m overselling things, former AATJ writer CJ Tutoro pointed out this stat from Evolving Hockey.

It’s not treading any new ground since the two passed more than 200 minutes together last season, but this came after the season was already lost and injuries had hampered Hamilton’s performance. A full season of the two together could be something special.

Even if the two don’t work out, the Devils have other strong options. Natural Stattrick (see link above) has a Graves-Hamilton pairing with CF% and xGF% both well above 52% over 450 minutes together in 5v5. Siegenthaler and Severson were even more effective in over 600 minutes from 5 to 5, with xGF% over 55%, which is great.

Speaking of Severson, the man may have brain farts here and there, but there’s no reasonable argument against him being a top 4 defenseman. Coming off a 46-point season in which he led all Devils skaters. in TOI while posting positive CF% and xGF% valueshis overall impact on the team is clearly positive.

This brings us to the most recent editions of the defense of the Devils. John Marino was the key player added to the Devils’ blue line this offseason in a trade with Pittsburgh involving former first-round pick Ty Smith. Marino has a similar profile to Siegenthaler in that he is very capable defensively, but won’t give you much on offense. I’d call him a new-age defensive back, but this type of player isn’t really that new right now, we’re just better at identifying him these days.

Brendan Smith, the other defenseman Fitzgerald added this offseason, is probably the only question mark I have on the blue line. After some very good years in Detroit, he is now a deeper option. However, the Devils also have several defenders who will try to contend for a roster spot (Bahl, Okhotyuk, Walsh), so he may end up in a sixth/seventh rotation instead of an everyday player for the Devils.

So in the last two years the Devils have gone from not having a strong blue line player at their own end to having two of the best such players in the league (Siegenthaler, Marino), they’ve added a star number one. defense, and another guy in the top 4 in Ryan Graves. So they now have 5 top 4 defensemen on their roster. This is one unit I can’t wait to see in action in October.

The best part of all of this is that it’s completely reasonable to assume that the Devils’ blue line will be even better in a couple of years. A lot will depend on the player’s age and development, but prospects Luke Hughes and Simon Nemec should help infuse the Devils’ blue line with the kind of high-level local talent the team has been missing during its rebuild. If you want to get really excited about the future of the Blue Line, check out Scott Wheeler’s recent article on the Top 50 Prospects ($). And if someone like Ethan Edwards or Seamus Casey or any of the other 100 defenders selected this year’s hits, they’ll have a lot of talent at the position, which isn’t something I imagined saying about the Devils’ blue line a month ago. When the Devils won their Stanley Cups the blue line was a huge key to their success, maybe in a few years we’ll be saying the same thing about the current Devils team.