With the restricted free agents profiled for this upcoming offseason, its time to shift our attention to the unrestricted free agents.<\/p>\n
The New Jersey Devils didn\u2019t have a lot of pending UFAs to begin with going into the offseason. The fact that the two I\u2019m going to write about this week are probably the two most notable is telling. But we\u2019ll look at them anyways and see if an argument can be made in regards to bringing one, both, or neither back as the Devils look ahead to the 2026-27 season. And if the Devils do bring either one back, what might their next deal look like?<\/p>\n
The Devils announced the signing of the 36-year old Evgenii Dadonov to a bonus laden one-year, $1M contract on July 1st of last year.<\/p>\n
Chris did the writeup of the deal last year<\/a> and liked the deal. I liked the deal as well, as I thought Dadonov could be a good source of secondary offense at a bargain rate. Judging from the comments section, most of you liked this deal initially as well. It was a low-risk, medium-reward type of signing by Tom Fitzgerald.<\/p>\n And then the season started.<\/p>\n Dadonov made his Devils debut on October 9th against Carolina, fractured his hand, and missed the next 17 games. He returned in the middle of November, played 4 more games before getting injured again against Detroit. He missed another 22 games before returning in the middle of January.<\/p>\n The good news is that Dadonov mostly remained healthy the rest of the way.<\/p>\n The bad news is that he didn\u2019t do much of anything in any of the games he would play.<\/p>\n His January return coincided with the Devils run of offensive futility. Dadonov mostly played a third or fourth line role and was invisible in those games. From January 11th to February 5th, he had eight SHOTS ON GOAL in 12 games. He only had 20 SOG for the entire season. He failed to ATTEMPT two shots a game. For some context, he was just shy of three attempts per game the previous season in Dallas when he netted 20 goals.<\/p>\n After the Olympic break, Dadonov was mostly benched down the stretch as the Devils had close to their full compliment of healthy forwards. He cleared waivers around the time of the trade deadline, but remained with the team and was never actually assigned to Utica.<\/p>\n When a late season injury to Arseny Gritsyuk popped up, Dadonov found himself back in the lineup. Why did this matter? Because his contract had bonuses in it that paid him an extra $250,000 if he crossed certain games played thresholds. Dadonov was approaching one of those at 20 games. Chris wrote about this as it was happening<\/a>.<\/p>\n With the Devils operating in LTIR throughout the entirety of the season, any bonuses achieved would be pushed to next season\u2019s books. Did outgoing GM Tom Fitzgerald make the prudent decision to save the Devils $250,000 on next year\u2019s books by literally playing anybody else other than Dadonov?<\/p>\n Dadonov would play in that 20th game. He earned the bonus that he and his agent was able to negotiate into his deal. Between that and Simon Nemec hitting three \u2018A\u2019 bonuses, the Devils have a bonus overage charge of $1.25M for next season<\/a>. With a tight cap situation, every dollar matters and the Devils wasted a quarter of a million dollars on next year\u2019s cap on a struggling, underperforming player who probably won\u2019t be on next year\u2019s team. It\u2019s an inexcusably poor decision by the now former Devils general manager Tom Fitzgerald.<\/p>\n At least Dadonov scored a goal in that 20th game. On a related note, it was the only goal, and only point, he would register as a Devil. It\u2019s about as garbage time as garbage time gets in a game they were already losing 5-1 to a Carolina team they never beat and under 30 seconds remaining on the clock, but it still counts<\/a>. Dadonov would play four more meaningless games down the stretch, appearing in 24 games total.<\/p>\n Ultimately, we were all wrong about Dadonov. He didn\u2019t provide any offense at all. The two injuries early in the season threw his campaign off the rails, and he was unable to do much of anything when he returned to get things back on track. Blame injuries if you want. Blame Father Time if you want. Blame his linemates, playing time, or situation if you want. I think they were probably all contributing factors to Dadonov\u2019s poor season to some extent. But the bottom line is that Dadonov, a player expected to contribute secondary offense, contributed nothing.<\/p>\n I think Dadonov, assuming he attempts to continue his NHL playing career, will struggle to find anything more than a PTO this offseason. AFP Analytics doesn\u2019t even have a contract projection for him, citing \u201cinsufficient data<\/a>\u201d. At his age though, and given how poorly this past season went, I would say there is plenty of sufficient data. The problem is that none of that is good and the best Dadonov could probably hope for is a 1-year, minimum salary type of deal.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t say that a 1-year, minimum salary type of deal is a bad deal. It\u2019s not too far off from what the Devils actually gave him for this past season. But I also can\u2019t sit here and suggest the Devils bring Dadonov back given the body of work from him this past season. I would expect Sunny Mehta to move on, and at Dadonov\u2019s age, the NHL portion of his playing career is probably over.<\/p>\n