Evangelista Gets Five Years. New Jersey Gets a Statement.

Two weeks ago the Devils gave up two draft picks to bring Luke Evangelista over from Nashville. On Tuesday night they gave him five more years. That's a quick answer to a question nobody had fully asked yet — and it tells you something about how the front office is thinking heading into camp.

The extension matters less as an individual move than as a piece of a larger argument. This offseason New Jersey locked up Hischier long-term, signed Gritsyuk to secure the rookie who put up 10 goals in his first full season, brought in Anthony Mantha on a two-year deal, and now stapled Evangelista, 24, to the roster through his prime. The forward group is being built deliberately, layer by layer, with an eye toward the kind of consistent offensive production that last season's 42-win club never really had. They finished with a goal differential of minus-24. The wins came close, and they came lucky.

The honest version of last season is that New Jersey outperformed what their underlying numbers suggested they deserved by a meaningful margin. I noted it in September when camp opened: the roster looked mostly settled, but the foundation it was sitting on was shakier than the record implied. Evangelista's extension doesn't fix the goaltending void or replace what Nemec gave them on the back end. What it does is add another young winger to a forward core that now has real depth on paper — and commits to finding out whether that depth can make the wins less fragile.

Whether it works is a camp question, then an October question. For now, the move is logged.