**New Jersey Devils Hire Sunny Mehta as GM**

As GM for the Devils, what can we hope he has brought with him from his prior experience in a back-to-back Cup-winning organization? 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. Sunny Mehta is the New Jersey Devils’ newest GM, a position he himself dreamed of as a kid. It’s a dream come true for many of us as well, with a data-driven, calculated individual at the helm who has a back-to-back Stanley Cup-winning pedigree to boot. Of course, there are certainly some lessons he likely learned or integrated with the Panthers during his five years there, and, as such, I certainly hope he brings those with him to his new organization. Let’s talk about the four most important: Lesson #1: Trust the Numbers It’s no secret that the Florida Panthers were an organization that made the bulk of their decisions through numbers, data, and analytics. Jeff Marek made it known on the What Chaos! podcast over a year ago that they never once made a choice without running it through Mehta, who was the leader of their analytics department. Just about every decision they made was data-forward, with one or two exceptions that I’m certain had under-the-hood reasons unavailable to the public eye. Regardless, the point is that they, as an organization, trusted in the numbers. The Devils, under Mehta, should do that too. The eye test, “intangibles,” locker room chemistry, etc., are all important to some extent, but the driving factor in decisions should be unskewed by bias, rooted in logic, and driven by data. Lesson #2: Commit to an Identity If there is one defining trait for what the Panthers were, and are, it is their idiosyncracy. They play their style of hockey — bruising, dump-and-chase-heavy, and in-your-face — and it is identifiable within a microsecond of viewing their on-ice product. Not only do their core players approach the game this way, but their peripheral players do, too. It was a clear, purposeful decision by the front office to get the team to play this way up and down the lineup. The Devils had that in 2022-23, when even their fourth line was a threat off the rush by proxy of having speed and skill throughout the entire lineup, and their defense was committed to moving the puck up-ice at all costs. They veered away from this identity, partly because the NHL is a copycat league and they were seemingly trying to force their club to play Panthers hockey because it was recently successful, and partly because the front office succumbed to the fan and pundit noise surrounding them about being “too soft.” The end result was a lineup fighting itself. The core forwards and defensemen — Jack Hughes, Jesper Bratt, Nico Hischier, Timo Meier, and Luke Hughes — want to play that rush-oriented game. Aside from a couple of peripheral players, the rest of the group is aching to play “playoff hockey.” It was particularly evident following the 2023-24 season. I think Tom Fitzgerald realized the error of his ways too late and adjusted to include Arseny Gritsyuk, Connor Brown, and Cody Glass. Still, it’s time for the squad to fully commit to having speed and skill throughout the lineup so that everybody is on the same page. Part of this certainly has to do with the defense corps’ general inability to get the puck up the ice with purpose bordering on chutzpah, with an innate need for this group to drastically improve their puck-moving ways. The other part has to do with injecting more speed and skill throughout the forward core and playing a system conducive to that style succeeding. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t use to get “tougher,” whatever that may look like, just that they desperately need to cut ties with those who cannot contribute meaningfully in the type of system their core is desperately aching to play. Lesson #3: Pull the Trigger Mehta already alluded to his desire to be a team that is assertive and decisive when it comes to making moves to better the team, extrapolating his poker experience of being “tight and aggressive” to hockey decision-making. His exact words were “When you have that moment, you’re extremely aggressive — you have to have the guts to do what it takes when that moment is right to win the hand,” which I certainly think is an area the Devils can use to improve. In the same trade deadline prior to their second consecutive Stanley Cup victory, the Panthers executed trades that brought Seth Jones, Brad Marchand, Vitek Vanecen, Kaapo Kahkonen, and Nico Sturm into the organization for their final push. The year prior, they acquired Kyle Okposo, Vladimir Tarasenko, and Magnus Hellberg at the trade deadline. Once they commit, they commit. Of course, that isn’t exclusive to the trade deadline. There have been plenty of other organization-altering trades executed while Mehta was in Florida outside of that short period of the season. Massive trades that brought in Matthew Tkachuk, Claude Giroux, Sam Reinhart, Sam Bennett, and Brandon Montour were all executed while Mehta had a major say in hockey operations and roster construction. Lesson #4: Sell High, Buy Low The Panthers became the league experts at buying low while Mehta was there, and that’s a philosophy I hope he brings to the Devils as well. At the time he was brought in to the Panthers, Sam Bennett’s career high in goals and points were 18 and 36, respectively, both of which came in his rookie season, five years prior to his being brought in to Florida. Emil Heineman was a recent second-round pick, and attaching a second-rounder at the time certainly seemed like too much value to be shipping off to Calgary in exchange for a then third-liner. Sure enough, something in Florida’s models had him as a buy-low candidate, and the rest is history. Then came Sam Reinhart, who was acquired for Devon Levi and a first-rounder. Reinhart, 25 at the time, had been a good, not superb, top-six guy who had never scored more than 25 goals or 60 points in an NHL season. Buffalo was extremely exploitable at the time (they also sent Brandon Montour to the Panthers for a third-rounder in the same off-season, mind you), and Mehta and the Panthers took advantage, buying low on a now-perennial Selke candidate winger who consistently scores point-per-game numbers every season. The pinnacle of selling high on assets came in the trade that brought Matthew Tkachuk to the organization. Of course, Tkachuk, then 24, let it be known that he did not want to stay in Calgary. What did Florida do, you ask? They sold exorbitantly high on Jonathan Huberdeau, 29, who was coming off a 115-point campaign in which his numbers were hyper-inflated by virtue of deployment, and who had middling-at-best underlying numbers. Mackenzie Weegar, who was 28, was having a genuinely great season as Florida’s #2 defenseman, but even he was unlikely to repeat the underlying dominance he had that year. Attaching a first and Cole Schwindt to the deal to sweeten it made it seem like a lot of value going to Calgary, but the reality is that none of the seasons were repeated by any of the players except Tkachuk, who is the second-most valuable player on his team and has played well above a point per game with them since getting acquired. So, to summarize the wild buy-low, sell-high moves the Panthers made while Sunny Mehta was a principal voice in their decision-making: In: Matthew Tkachuk (24), Sam Reinhart (25), Sam Bennett (24), Brandon Montour (26)Out: Jonathan Huberdeau (29), Mackenzie Weegar (28), Devon Levi (19), Cole Schwindt (21), Emil Heineman (19), 2022 1st, 2025 1st, 2022 2nd, 2021 3rd That is an absurd track record. Sure seems like making moves like that is a forte of Mehta’s, and I certainly hope he can identify these same core-age buy-low candidates to take the Devils to the promised land. There are many lessons to be learned from the Florida Panthers. Many fans flock to the wrong one, assuming that the only way to win in the NHL is through copying their recipe, but the others certainly take precedence in everyday roster construction and decision-making. I can only assume he will be bringing all four of these philosophies to New Jersey as their decision-maker, and thus, it should be an extremely exciting off-season and imminent future for the Devils. 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. Subscribe to Devils' Advocates