NHL Free Agency Day 1 is in the books!
The New Jersey Devils and General Manager Tom Fitzgerald made some moves to improve their 2025-26 roster.
In a shocking twist, the NJ Devils re-signed goaltender Jake Allen to a 5 year, $1.8M/per deal. What a masterful move by Tom Fitzgerald and a “good guy” gesture by Allen. I am glad to see him back. This one stunned many in the hockey world. Multiple teams were ready to throw some serious contracts at Allen to land him.
The New Jersey Devils then turned their attention to the bottom 6, signing RW Connor Brown of the Edmonton Oilers to a 4 year x $3M deal and forward Evgenii Dadonov of the Dallas Stars to a $1M base contract with bonuses. (details of the bonuses have not been made public yet)
Defenseman Dennis Cholowski was brought back on a one way $775k contract.
Overall the NJ Devils definitely improved over the course of the day.
How much did the Devils improve?
Was this enough?
Is Fitzy done, or will we see more?!?
I discuss all of this and more in this video.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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8 Comments
Ace, your voice sounds damaged dude 😳 feel better soon. If you look at what's happening across the league, it's not too bad so far. I wanna see Luke sign for something sensible next. Allen retained for $1.8 million is genius (the cap is going through the roof soon), Brown is a definite upgrade to the bottom 6… he preforms in the play offs too. Dadanov means there's another Russian speaker in the room for Gritsuyk.
Other than Allen and marner traded there wasn't much excitement and nothing out there to be excited about. And yes much more about covering Fitz 🍑
Fitz is clueless, hope I'm wrong but I strongly believe nothing else will be done
If this is all Fitz does we will lose in round 1 again. I will flip out.
We added a 30 year old and a 36 year old. We still have absolutely no depth at center if Hughes or Nico go down season over
The best thing about this Free Agency is we didn’t do anything to hurt our cap in the long run.
Signing Cholowski instead of Brendan Smith who can play big minutes, can hit and put puck in the net is a massive failure. Metro looks trash again and it gives somes hope the Devils make the Playoffs.But even if they do which I'm not sure about they'll get bounced in the first round again. The Devils are spot jogging.
Love allen for 1.8…. Dadanov and brown are great bottom 6 signings… palat and mercer (not happy about mercer) have to b traded to create cap space, so we can trade for a top 6 goal scorer… does that mean hamiton gets traded? (I hope not) but hamilton, nemec, casey and 2 years of draft picks could most certainly get us the top 6 goal scoring winger and some defense to fill the spots cause of the injuries