Welcome to the dog days of the offseason, where news trickles to a crawl, players retreat to their various training hubs and Canada heads to the cottage. We are inching closer to the new Sunny era of Devils Hockey where he may or may not be done heading in the 26-27 season. So, to contradict myself I am going to make the assumption Sunny is done (at elast on D) and take a look at how this group looks heading into the season.

About 10 games into the season last year I wrote quite possibly the most misguided blog in my life about the D Corps being elite. Well that turned out to not be true, as things absolutely fell apart after Pesce got hurt. Then we went through the “business of our lineup,” Luke’s own goals, Kovacevic looking like a beer leaguer when he came back, Siegs doing his good year/bad year thing etc… The only steady person on the backend in 25-26 was Dillon, and it’s not a good thing when your most reliable defenseman is the 35 year old 6D. What a mess – and as a quick aside, we had way too much drama last season, and I look forward to things being a little quieter.

After Nemec’s trade to Calgary this group looks to be largely unchanged, and in conversations with James Nichols and Anthony Corona Sunny indicated he thinks this group is going to be good this upcoming season: from his conversation with Nichols:

“I like our blue line a lot,” Mehta said. “In addition to it necessarily being a model thing, I think also you have to keep in mind the injury stuff… Even just getting this group back fully healthy, Luke [Hughes] especially. Having the whole group healthy will be huge in terms of how we didn’t really see this group at full strength last year.”

As with this whole team, health will be the no. 1 need – and healthy, I am cautiously optimistic about the group moving into 2026-27. Further, a better and deeper forward group that is slotted and deployed more effectively will go a long way in all three zones.

So I thought I’d take a look at the probable D-pairs this season, and what needs to go right for Sunny to be correct in his assessment.

This will most likely be our first pair.

A lot of it hinges on Luke as Jared wrote earlier this week and it’s a pretty common for people to project a big breakout for him next season. While I think it is certainly possible, there is a twinge of wishcasting involved; If the Devils are going to be a thing in 2026-27 and get back on track after 3 lackluster seasons, it absolutely needs to happen – he needs to take that step to become the 9 million dollar 1D that we used a 4th overall to select.

This is the season Luke shows us whether he is on a path toward the Werenski/Quinn Level (high end), K’Andre Miller in Carolina level (upper mid), or Bowen Byram Level (mid/low). These are all similar tools-y defensemen who took a few years to really hit their stride and Luke is in a similar mold. The skillset is there, just the decision making needs to catch up.

All of his offensive numbers are fine to great, but he struggles in a few different interconnected defensive areas: puck retrievals on dump-ins (retrieval success), transition turnovers (exit success rate) and and allowing scoring chances off of zone entries (entry chance prevention). For the laymen reading this: he gets targeted on dump-ins, botches getting the puck up and out cleanly, turns it over, and the other team gets chances from it. He stinks at this, and it flat out just needs to get better, and I think it will as it is the last piece that young offensive defensemen figure out. One thing that will help is better, more competent forwards to actually receive passes and make the right reads in the D-zone.

Offensively, Luke does get his shot blocked a lot, but only a tick more than the elite shooting defensemen/PP QBs in the league (25-26 stats from Moneypuck). When you look at missed nets + blocked shots he is right there in good company. If we clean up more rebounds this upcoming season, this won’t be much a complaint anymore.

His partner will likely be Brett Pesce, who needs one main thing: health. He only played 37 games last season, and missed 10 in his first Devils season. In fact, in his 11 seasons, he has only played a full season twice and 70 or more games 6 of the 11 times. This isn’t to disparage Pesce, he plays a hard game and eats tons of pucks (7th in the league for shots blocked per game).

Of D-Pairs with over 1000 minutes together over the past two seasons, they are the 12th ranked pair in xGF%, 16th in GA/60 and 19th in HD Chances against. That’s elite company and with Luke taking a step and Pesce staying healthy, we should have a very good #1 D pairing.

After Luke and Pesce there are arguments to be made for both options for the bottom 4 and I will discuss that a little later. But for my money I am re-uniting our shutdown gods from the 2024-25 season to start the season. In 748 minutes together at 5v5 in 24-25 this pair was stifling, holding opponents to 1.8 xGA/60 and 1.3 GA/60. Both of these were the BEST defensive rates in the entire league, and only one of three pairs with over 700 minutes together that were under 2.0 xGA/60. Dat’s good.

For them to return to this form, both need to bounce back after last season. With Siegenthaler, this seems to be his pattern where he mostly alternates between good season/bad season. He is trending down somewhat into the 50s for WAR (top right), but that is largely being dragged down by his near zero offensive contributions (white and blue dotted lines on bottom right). His defense is near perfect at a very high Quality of Competition, so re-uniting the shutdown pair feeds his strength.

Kovacevic’s bounce back is a little more uncertain and is 100% based on his health, as it does often take time to fully recover from severe knee injuries. He was a mess upon his return and looked less mobile than this one 65 year old that I play beer league with. Often it takes 18 months+, and if you weren’t paying attention he started to look more like himself post-Olympics where he and Luke we a very good pairing.

Below is his moving game score average, which was finally positive in March:

That’s an encouraging trend. With a full off-season, full training camp, and fresh start with no one breathing down his neck to take his job I am encouraged that he can bounce back. Couple that with a Siegenthaler reunion, I am hopeful this can work again.

Quick trivia question: Which regular Devils defense pairing had the highest xGF% at 5v5 over the past two years? This wasn’t a trick question, it was Dougie and Dillon, who, in 836 minutes over the past two seasons have sported a 53.7 xGF% and over 3 xGF/60 (the only Devils pair to be over 3.0).

Now before I declare them the greatest offensive pairing these eyes have ever seen, I do want to note that was on 13% offensive zone starts and 60% on-the-fly starts (so effectively 73% moving to an offensive posture). And honestly, I am totally fine with that type of deployment, as Dougie is still our best offensive defenseman, so put him in a position to succeed. It did become a bit of an adventure defensively, as they were also the worst regular defensive pair we had over the past two years, as they yielded 2.8 xGA/60.

If this bottom 4 group doesn’t work there are some other options. Dougie and Siegs were the second best offensive pair and Dillon/Kovacevic could be a decent defensive pair (although they have pretty mediocre results in 130 minutes together). Don’t discount how good Luke and Kovacevic looked at the end of the year either. Chisholm could also come in and shock us and be a regular – there is precedent for small moves on defense paying off: Marino, Siegenthaler, Gus Forsling to name a few. Also, don‘t sleep on Silayev who I have no idea how he will look. He could be a revelation, he could be nothing. Or somewhere in between.

Special Teams / Deployment

I’ll start with the PK, because that isn’t all that complicated. I would keep Siegs and Kovacevic together as a pair and run Dillon and Pesce as the other. Dougie can be an admirable fill-in since Dillon and Kovacevic take a decent amount of penalties. Luke is the break glass option. In a perfect world this then allows the Devils to run Luke-Dougie for the post penalty shift to tilt the ice back to offense.

The Power Play is a little more nebulous between Luke and Dougie up top. They may alternate based on matchups, which they have tried, but it’s hard to dig up exactly how successful that was. In terms of productivity, over the past two years Dougie has the advantage by most metrics: Shot attempts/60 (122 vs 113), Shots/60 (67 vs 61), and expected goals/60 (12 vs 10). However, Luke took the mantle this past season and was more valuable up top surpassing Dougie on all the aforementioned metrics: Shot attempts/60 (120 vs 110), Shots/60 (68 vs 59) expected goals/60 (11 vs 10.6). So it seems we should be in good hands either way, and as we all know the true PP QB is Jack, and frankly of all of the issues we have had the past three years, the power play has not been one.

The Devils should have a pretty good d-Corps, and be in the top half of the league, and if all goes right we could crack the top 10. In terms of pure points/production Dougie and Luke will likely be carrying the load there with Pesce and Dillon chipping in an odd goal. But we do have nice balance in theory: a high octane pair, a balanced two way pair and and a pure shut down pair. This allows for creativity and flexibility in deployment and solid, defined roles.

I would also like to see the style and activation we saw post Olympics last year, where we are less “fight the panic” and more push the pace. I’d like to see them all joining the rush as the 4th man more. I’d like to see them take the first pass option as opposed to waiting for all three forwards to complete their routes before checking down to a tip-dump. The Devils are their most effective as a rush team and that often starts with the D group starting said rush.

What do you think? Do you agree with Sunny? Do we need different elements in this group? Are we too reliant on too many things needing to go right this season? Sound off below!