The Devils' Cup Price Went From +2500 to +1400 on a Goalie Coming Off His Worst Season. The Market Is Right Anyway

The Winnipeg Jets traded Connor Hellebuyck to the New Jersey Devils on Friday, the day his suspension for skipping training camp was due to end. Winnipeg received forwards Dawson Mercer and Nick Bjugstad, goaltender Nico Daws, the rights to Alexander Command, whom the Devils took 12th overall in June, a 2029 second-round pick and a 2027 seventh. The Devils announced it with "Buyck'd around and found our guy." Hellebuyck's own first public comment, to the Associated Press on Saturday, was "Sitting at home for so long was getting to me."

The betting market moved before most of the analysis was written. DraftKings cut the Devils' Stanley Cup price from +2500 to +1400, Covers reported, which moves their implied title chance from 3.9 percent to 6.7 percent. BetMGM has them at +1500, having opened them at +3000 and listed them at +3300 the night before the season. One player nearly doubled a team's championship price. And that player's last full season was the worst of his career.

We think the move is right. The reason is not that Hellebuyck is a three-time Vezina winner. It is that the goaltending the Devils had before Friday was very bad.

What New Jersey was starting from

NHL.com has the Devils at 6-4-0, fourth in the Metropolitan Division, scoring 3.30 goals a game with a team save percentage of .876, tied for 23rd. Jake Allen, 36, is at .883 in six starts. Daws, now a Jet, was at .874. ESPN's Ryan S. Clark gives the underlying picture: New Jersey controls 59.74 percent of five-on-five shot attempts, near the top of the league, and is good at limiting chances. Its five-on-five save percentage is 89.95, 13th-lowest.

That is a team that already plays well in front of its goaltender and gets let down by him. Trades rarely fix a weakness that cleanly. A team with bad shot share would have needed Hellebuyck to make up for its skaters. This team needed him to stop shots the skaters had already made harder.

The arithmetic is simple. Per 100 shots, a .876 goaltender allows 12.4 goals. At .895, Hellebuyck's 2025-26 figure, it is 10.5. At .916, his career regular-season mark over 625 games, it is 8.4. Even at last season's level he saves the Devils about two goals per 100 shots against Allen and Daws so far. If he returns to his normal level, it is closer to four. For a team already scoring 3.30 a game, two to four goals per 100 shots is a large margin.

The best case against the price

The case against is strong and needs stating in full.

First, the recent form. In 2025-26 Hellebuyck went 23-23-11 with a 2.86 goals-against average and a .895 save percentage in 57 starts. NHL.com calls it his worst season. The year before, he won 47 games at .925 and took the Hart. The market is betting that the .925 is the real Hellebuyck and the .895 was a blip. He is 33, and at 33 that is not a safe assumption.

Second, the layoff. His last NHL game was April 13, a 6-2 loss to Vegas, per the AP. He skipped training camp and has not played since. Clark expects an adjustment period, and no debut date has been set.

Third, and most relevant to a Cup price: the playoffs. Hellebuyck's postseason record is 24-34 with a .903 save percentage in 58 games, per NHL.com. That is 13 points below his regular-season number over a sample that is no longer small. A Stanley Cup bet is a bet on April through June. Anyone who argues that his playoff record is what matters, not his regular-season record, has the record on their side.

Why the move still holds

All three points are real, and none of them beats .876.

Take the bear case at its worst: Hellebuyck plays the whole season at last year's .895 and the playoffs at his career .903. That is still a clear upgrade on what the Devils have had in goal. The price is not betting on a Vezina-level season. It needs Hellebuyck to be decent, because the team in front of him already does the rest. A move from 3.9 to 6.7 percent takes the Devils from roughly one chance in 26 to roughly one in 15. For a team with a 59.74 percent shot share, that is a modest claim.

Devils general manager Sunny Mehta, in his first season, used the betting word himself. "You want to bet on a person that has a large sample size of excellent results, who's on a good cap hit," he told NHL.com. The contract is $8.5 million a year through 2030-31. That last clause is the risk in Mehta's bet, not in this season's Cup price: four more seasons after this one, starting at age 34. "Connor made his choice to do (this) how he chose to do it," general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff said Friday.

What would prove us wrong

If Hellebuyck's first 15 starts look like last season (save percentage around .895, goals-against near 3) and the Devils' five-on-five save percentage barely improves, then the problem was not the goaltender and the market overpaid. If New Jersey's shot share drops as the team starts relying on him, that would point the same way. Both are measurable by American Thanksgiving.

Hellebuyck faces Winnipeg in Winnipeg on November 10 and the Jets come to Newark on November 28. Neither game will move the Cup price much. The save percentage over the next month will.