‘WIN NOW’ MENTALITY COST SHERO HIS JOB
Missteps turned ambitious plan into a long-term rebuild
A year ago, New Jersey finished with the third-worst record in the NHL and won the draft lottery for the second time in three years. This season, with six players under the age of 23, the Devils are back in the lottery hunt with the fifth-worst record overall.
For a rebuilding team, this used to be the blueprint to long-term success.
You bottom out. You draft big. You develop. And then you take baby steps toward respectability.
It’s the blueprint that Ray Shero benefited from when he was the general manager in Pittsburgh and inherited a team that had previously drafted Marc-Andre Fleury (1st overall, 2003), Evgeni Malkin (2nd overall, ’04) and Sidney Crosby (1st overall, ’05). And it’s one that Los Angeles, Chicago, Edmonton, Buffalo and Toronto have all followed to varying degrees of success.
So why was Shero fired as New Jersey’s GM on Sunday?
Well, because the blueprint has changed. You can’t sit back and draft and develop and wait for things to turn around. You have to swing for the fences. You have to gamble.
But mostly, he got fired because he (falsely) inflated expectations.
It’s not that GMs are impatient. It’s that owners, who watched Vegas reach the Stanley Cup final as a first-year expansion team and a year later saw Columbus sweep the Presidents’ Trophy winners (Tampa) in the first round after some risky deadline deals, have become impatient.
As one GM told me, ever since Vegas went to the final, owners have started asking: “Why can’t that be us?”
No one wants to be Buffalo or even Edmonton. No one wants to hear about a five-year plan. They want to be St. Louis, and go from dead last to winning a championship in months — not years.
That was why Shero got impatient and — taking a page out of Brian Burke’s playbook — tried to speed up the rebuild.
New Jersey’s big move last summer should have been adding No. 1 overall draft pick Jack Hughes to a team that had previously drafted Nico Hischier with the No. 1 pick. Instead, with Taylor Hall heading into the final year of his contract, the team doubled down and acquired P.K. Subban in a trade from Nashville. The Devils then followed it up by signing Wayne Simmonds and KHL forward Nikita Gusev.
“This was the right time, the right moment,” Shero said after acquiring Subban one day after drafting Hughes. “This was somewhat unexpected. But we were ready to do it.”
Of course, what happened next was not unexpected.
This wasn’t the right time or the right moment for Shero to be aggressive. Even with Hughes and Subban, the Devils’ roster had significant flaws. They lacked a No. 1 goalie and didn’t yet have a proven No. 1 centre. They were still thin on defence. Mostly, however, they were too young and too inexperienced to take a big step forward.
So when the team began the season with six straight losses and was out of the playoff picture by December, Shero was forced to change course. He fired head coach John Hynes and then traded Hall to Arizona before his value diminished.
Suddenly, Shero was preaching patience. A month later, he was fired.
The NHL is an impossible league to handicap. Who could have predicted that San Jose, which reached the conference final last year, would have the third-worst record in the West? Or that Columbus, which lost Artemi Panarin, Sergei Bobrovsky and Matt Duchene in the summer, would be one point out of a wild-card spot?
Who guessed that Arizona and Vancouver would be in playoff positions ahead of Winnipeg and Nashville?
Today, the Devils are where everyone expected them to be: at the bottom of the standings.
Hughes, who has two goals and four points in his past five games, is developing into a No. 1 centre. Louis Domingue, who has allowed five goals in his past four starts, is looking like a legitimate starting goalie.
No one would be surprised if everything clicks next year and they’re back in the playoffs. Then again, don’t be surprised if they’re back in the mix for the No. 1 pick again.