Jack Hughes’ Impact on Devils in 2025-26 Was Staggering

Thanks to Jack Hughes‘ Golden Goal at the Olympics, his talent is no longer a secret kept within the confines of The Garden State. In the matter of seconds, American fanbases who used to boo him quickly became some of his biggest fans.

But nobody has learned what Jack means to a team more than, well, his actual National Hockey League (NHL) club: the New Jersey Devils.

Jack’s Mind-Boggling Impact

Before even getting into the numbers, all it takes is a quick listen to a couple of his teammates to realize the impact of his talent:

“[We] have one of the best players in the world in Jack, I mean, since the Olympic break, I’ve seen him do things that I haven’t seen with my own eyes,” said 15-year veteran netminder Jake Allen. “To be honest, I’ll put him up there with anyone.”

“He’s up there [with the best of the best], you know, Jack’s really, really impressed me,” said forward Connor Brown, who was once Connor McDavid’s linemate with the Edmonton Oilers.

While Jack has struggled with injuries in the past, his lone injury this season came via an unfortunate off-ice “freak” accident which injured his hand. He gutted through an early return, where NHL EDGE data showed just 20% of his season’s “hardest shots” came between his injury and the Olympic break, despite that being 53% of the games he had played.

“He played through things that a lot of guys wouldn’t play through. That’s a testament to his character,” said Brown.

Despite wearing a limited mobility brace on the ice and looking like a shell of his dominant self, he still posted 16 points in 19 games. He was finally able to remove the brace and get back into a groove at the Olympics, culminating in one of the most iconic moments in American sports history.

When he returned to the Devils, he rode his unwavering confidence to a tremendous 41 points in 25 games — second to only McDavid (42 points) during that span. With Jack fully healthy, the Devils were 26-14-2 (.643 PTS%). With Jack limited or entirely out, they were 16-23-1 (.413 PTS%) — that’s a ~36% difference.

To put it further into perspective, a .643 PTS% over a full season would have been seventh in the NHL. A .413 PTS% would have been 31st. Wow.

While the injuries skew his counting stats, a deeper dive further backs up how drastic the difference is. With Jack in the lineup, even including the times he was hindered by injury, the Devils scored 3.00 goals per game (GF/GP). In the 21 games Jack was out, they scored a dismal 2.05 GF/GP. That’s a 32% decrease. (via Natural Stat Trick)

While the Devils certainly need to add scoring depth in the offseason, Jack’s presence alone propels them from a lottery team to respectable. Head coach Sheldon Keefe elaborated on that:

“Obviously, Jack’s presence is very significant … I look at it as different portions of the season, right? The first part of the season, the first 17 games that he plays with us, we’re 12-4-1 and second overall in the league. I look at the second portion of the season where he’s healthy coming out of the Olympics, and we like our game in that portion too. Those two segments of the season, we play at a .640-points percentage, which would have us seventh overall in the NHL. Those portions you feel good about … It speaks to the impact that Jack has, but it also kind of exposed how we need to have more support underneath that. We can’t be vulnerable like that … When Jack plays the team looks one certain way and plays one certain way, and when he leaves, it seems to take a while for us to recalibrate and to figure our game out.”

– Devils’ head coach Sheldon Keefe

Surely, it’s a reasonable knock that Jack has been unable to stay in the lineup. Injury-prone superstars in all sports have that used against them. But from the eye test, Jack finally seemed to grasp how to be effective without constantly putting himself in vulnerable positions. He wasn’t getting regularly tossed around like he had in previous seasons.

To further that, it’s worth noting that Sidney Crosby missed 152 of his first 622 career games (24.4%); Jack has missed 106 of 535 (19.8%). The point of that is to show there’s still plenty of time for the injury narrative to switch, as Jack is only 24 years old.

Post-Olympics, he contributed to 41 of his team’s 83 goals — 49.4%. That stacks up with Connor McDavid (42/84, 50.0%), and is far past both Nikita Kucherov (39/91, 42.9%) and Nathan MacKinnon (34/87, 39.1%).

The reason for that discrepancy is because McDavid’s Oilers, much like Jack’s Devils, were not filled with nearly as much scoring depth compared to Kucherov’s Tampa Bay Lightning or MacKinnon’s Colorado Avalanche.

The Olympics started the narrative, but once the Devils surround him with more talent, the world will realize that Jack is truly amongst the league’s best.