New Jersey Devils' Defensemen 2025-26 Report Card

Part four of the all-encompassing 2025-26 report card for the New Jersey Devils, this time covering the defensemen who ended the year on the roster. Thank you, as always, for reading the Devils’ Advocates Substack! If you enjoy the quasi-daily content, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends, family, and any Devils fan you know. It is completely free of charge and helps out quite a bit! Consider checking out the Devils’ Advocates Podcast, which features weekly episodes chock-full of in-depth content and exciting guest appearances. They’ll be available on this Substack, but you can also listen on your favorite platforms at the following links: Devils’ Advocates is a completely free-of-charge publication. Put in your email below and press “subscribe” to receive updates when new posts become available. A week or so has gone by since the last installment of the Devils’ 2025-26 report card series, having already covered the top six forwards, bottom six forwards, and forwards who were not mainstays in the lineup. This time around, we’re getting the gradebook out for the six defensemen who ended the season in the starting lineup: Brenden Dillon, Dougie Hamilton, Johnathan Kovacevic, Jonas Siegenthaler, Luke Hughes, and Simon Nemec. Brenden Dillon’s beginning to 2025-26 was absolutely electric. For the first six or so weeks of the season, there was a very, very legitimate argument to him being the best blueliner on the team. At the end of the first month of the season, he was second in the entire NHL in Goals Above Replacement (GAR). In early November, he had impacts that looked like this: There’s really not much more you can ask for there, right? Elite on both ends of the ice and a net positive in penalties and shorthanded defense. Especially for Dillon, this resurgence was pretty unfounded. That play gradually tempered off, but that certainly doesn’t mean that Dillon didn’t still end the 2025-26 season with positive on-ice impacts. Come season’s end, he was just one of two Devils’ defensemen to log an expected goal share (xGF%) of over 50%, getting as close as can be with a hilarious 50.01% xGF%. Admittedly, the Devils did not control the majority of scoring chances or high-danger chances while Dillon was on the ice, but the team controlled enough of the shot attempt share (CF%) and shots on goal that it ended up barely in the Devils’ favor in the aggregate. All in all, though, I have a feeling that the gradual decline in play was a byproduct of wear and tear from last season’s injury recovery and playing with a partner who struggled more and more defensively as the season went on. Despite that, his isolated impacts still ended up pretty strong, especially for the role he was designated to: That’s more representative of what we’d expect en masse from Dillon — negative isolated offensive results but strong enough defensive impacts to even it out. As such, Dillon gets a B. Even prior to his post-benching production explosion — a stretch that saw him pot 28 points (seven goals, 21 assists) in 37 games, an 82-game pace of 62 points — Dougie Hamilton was playing severely underrated hockey. Before that day — January 11 — Hamilton’s deployment was questionable, to say the least. He had the third-highest defensive zone start percentage (dZS%) on the team, beginning his shifts in the defensive zone 58.02% of the time. He was also consistently getting the toughest deployment competition-wise, logging heavy 5v5 minutes against first lines and first pairings. That’s not Hamilton’s role, though — he has always been deployed primarily in favorable positions on the ice against second-tier competition, something that is a commonality between high-point-producing defensemen. Victor Hedman and Roman Josi, at their peaks, played in similar capacities, as do most Norris candidate-level defensemen now. What I’m getting at is that there is a misconception about how highly-paid, high-production defensemen should be deployed. Some seem to believe that the high dollar amount equates to more difficult deployment, but that simply has not been the case throughout hockey history, and it seems silly to project that to Hamilton as well. Despite getting some of the hardest minutes in the league, Hamilton sported an xGF% of 53.49% prior to his benching, third-best on the team and tops among blueliners. The production wasn’t there, to be clear — he had just 11 points in 40 games at that point — but that was certainly a byproduct of that deployment and the fact that the Devils were shooting a mind-bogglingly poor 4.80% with him on the ice despite controlling the vast majority of scoring chances (53.06%) and high-danger chances (56.55%). Post-scratch, Hamilton’s deployment changed drastically, and his production made sense once again. Instead of starting in the offensive zone 41.98% of the time, he started in the offensive zone 52.51% of the time. That 10-point swing, in reality, is Hamilton starting in the offensive zone over 25% more often than he was pre-scratch. It doesn’t hurt that positive regression hit, either, with the Devils shooting at a still-below-league-average-but-much-better 9.68% with No. 7 on the ice after January 11. Of course, his underlying metrics were still elite (on both sides of the puck, to be clear), and, as such, his end-of-season numbers were the best on the team across the board. I can’t justify giving him an A of some sort, considering the lackluster production in the first half of the season, but a B+ seems more than fair, especially considering the defensive strides he took with Brad Shaw running the defensemen. Moving foward, I think it would be prudent to keep Hamilton on the books for 2026-27 and beyond. He is an excellent defenseman — one well-worth his $9 million AAV price tag. It feels wrong to give Johnathan Kovacevic as poor a grade as this considering that he likely never fully recovered from his ACL/MCL injury throughout the course of the season, but the reality is that he was pretty atrocious for the most part. In the games I tracked, Kovacevic’s zone denial rate was exorbitantly low, with teams absolutely realizing that his lack of mobility by virtue of his knee injury would allow them to exploit him off the rush. He was slow on direction changes, and his lack of mobility also caused him to take a ton of penalties — his 4.2 PIM/60 was easily the highest of his career. Kovacevic’s underlying numbers for the season are heavily carried by Luke Hughes’ post-Olympic tear, but even then he grades out as being somewhat underwater. He ended the year with an xGF% of 48.41%, though it should be noted that his xGF% away from Luke was a 46.02% and that Luke’s xGF% without Kovacevic was 3% higher than his xGF% with Kovacevic. By all accounts, he anchored the potential of who should be the Devils’ #1 defenseman, and that in and of itself is a pretty big inherent negative. I would anticipate Kovacevic having a legitimate bounce-back next season, but for 2025-26, he gets a D+. It was a bit of a weird season for Jonas Siegenthaler, where I earnestly could not tell you any specific moment or stretch he had that was particularly good or particularly bad. I’m comfortable saying that his second half of the season was stronger than his first half of the season, but 1) not by much and 2) it was still somewhat underwhelming considering his prior history as being a stalwart defender. On a season-wide scale, Siegenthaler ended 2025-26 with an xGF% of 49.39%, third-worst of the six regulars on this list. It was an atypical season in the sense that the Devils gave up a bit more than one would expect while No. 71 was on the ice, with an expected goals against per hour (xGA/60) of 2.73, just 0.02 off his career-worst season in 2023-24. Oddly enough, the Devils’ expected goals for per hour (xGF/60) of 2.67 was the second-best of his career, tied with that very same season. In other words, the Devils both produced more xG and allowed more xG than we’re used to from Siegenthaler while he was on the ice in 2025-26. Given his history in New Jersey and the likelihood that a Kovacevic bounce-back season is imminent based on health, I think it’s entirely possible, if not plausible, that we see Siegenthaler rebound to being defensively dominant in 2026-27 as well. That said, for this season, he gets a firm C. If we were solely basing this gradebook on post-Olympic play, Luke would have had an A+++ — he was easily the Devils’ best defenseman in that span and arguably was their best overall player from an underlying perspective. Once he returned from his injury, Luke was an absolute monster on both ends of the ice. He was the most puck-dominant defender on the team by far, with the offense either flowing through his or his brother’s stick at almost all times. His post-injury comeback saw an xGF% of 54.84%, being the best defenseman on the team in that regard and placing fourth on the team behind the top line of Nico Hischier, Timo Meier, and Dawson Mercer. Luke had the second-best CF%, with the Devils controlling 57.41% of the shot attempts in his minutes, and the second-best shot share (SF%), 58.21%, behind only Arseny Gritsyuk. By all accounts, he was who the Devils needed him to be. It should also be said that, for the season, Luke had the third-best xGF/60 on the power play of any defenseman in the league (11.11), narrowly behind Evan Bouchard (11.42) and his brother, Quinn (11.39). Luke had by far the best scoring chances for per hour (SCF/60) on the power play of any blueliner in the NHL and the fourth-best high-danger chances for per 60 (HDCF/60) total as well. I should note that Dougie Hamilton was top-10 across the board as well. That said, taking in the scope of the full season certainly paints Luke in a lesser light, with the first half of his campaign being rough. His pre-injury xGF% was just 47.68%, with the only regular defenseman up to that point doing worse being Nemec. Of course, Luke had the infamous two own-goal game that saw him get booed every time he touched the puck in that timeframe as well, and he had a number of ill-advised plays that cost the Devils goals against. I’m certain some of that, if not a lot of that, had to do with never really getting in the rhythm of the season after missing training camp, but it still stands true that he was inarguably the Devils’ second-worst defenseman on the club prior to his injury in mid-January. Luke’s post-injury play, though, was excellent enough for me to give him a C+. I might get some flak for this, but I don’t think Simon Nemec had a good 2025-26 at all outside of the two-week stretch where he was forced into #1 minutes by virtue of injuries. He was legitimately great in that stretch, one that saw him be the overtime hero in a number of games and sport strong underlying statistics for the most part. Outside of that anomalous couple of weeks, though, I thought Nemec looked like a deer in headlights for the most part, particularly on the defensive front. I don’t think anyone will understate his offensive chops and flashes of true brilliance with the puck on his stick, but there is still so much work to be done defensively that, to me, those offensive tools don’t really matter much in this context. Yes, he is young, but Nemec’s defensive brain lapses, endless puck-watching, and positional cluelessness are extremely frustrating and cost the Devils tremendously. Among the 146 blueliners to log at least 1000 minutes at 5v5 this season, Nemec had the fifth-worst goals against per hour (GA/60), almost all of that coming as a byproduct of his defensive ineptitude. On the season, Nemec sported a defense-worst 48.02% xGF%, with a lot of that being buoyed by that two-week stretch. The Devils controlled fewer than half of the shot attempts, shots on goal, and scoring chances in his 5v5 minutes, and far fewer high-danger chances than the opposition. All of that came while logging the most favorable deployment from a zone start perspective and in somewhat sheltered, third-pair minutes against soft competition. Defensively, Nemec just cannot keep pace with the NHL right now. So, as good as that two-week stint as the Devils’ 1D was, I can’t give him better than a D+. The next installment of this series will be the last, covering the part-time defensemen and goaltenders. Stay tuned! Devils’ Advocates is a completely free-of-charge publication. Put in your email below and press “subscribe” to receive updates when new posts become available.