On the Eve of a New Season | 10 TAKEAWAYS

Hello from Prague! On the eve of the Devils 2024-25 regular season beginning! We've been waiting for this for a while, haven't we? It was a long summer, and training camp can always feel a bit grueling, but here we are. One night away.

Over here in Prague, Czechia, the season will open on the international stage as the team puts last year in the rear-view mirror and begins anew with a new head coach, new players, and a blank slate. It's all quite exciting.

The first order of business when arriving in Prague was dealing with jetlag. It can hit you pretty hard if you're not careful. I took a brief poll after Day 2 in Prague, trying to figure out how everyone was adjusting to the time change. I think Nico Hischier topped the list with 5 coffees (but I’m pretty sure he said it in jest) to stay awake through the day. Jesper Bratt said he had his usual two.

It's been an incredible experience here in Prague - an absolutely beautiful city with such rich culture and a thirst for hockey. It was fun getting to spend some time with Patrik Elias, too, who has been beaming while watching his home country embrace his home team. We were standing together near a bunch of kids who were watching practice on Thursday, I had a bunch of signed 'Elias' pucks to hand out. I asked him if he wanted to hand them out, it would be more special than coming from me. He responded with a great quip about how these 10-year-old kids have no idea who he is. It's their parents who might actually have an idea instead!

Quickly our conversation changed focus, he went into a much more serious tone when talking about the upcoming games. He still uses the 'we' when referring to the Devils, which I love because he is still so much a part of the identity of the team. And like any good athlete, he said now that all these past few days are behind them, it's time to get off to a good start, these games mean a lot outside the on-ice experience, but when that puck drops, it's go-time.

A new season ahead... just like a new season ahead for 10 Takeaways!

In this opening season edition, on the eve before the start of the regular season, here is a collection of anecdotes, behind-the-scenes moments, and a taste of the trip to Prague.

1.

There has been such excitement in the buildup to the start of the regular season, and it really starts with the players brought in over the summer to help round out the roster. Their excitement to be a part of this group is palpable, and that can radiate down through the whole group.

Take, for example, one of the first things Brett Pesce said to me when I met him for the first time just before the start of training camp. His words were: “I’m on Cloud 9.”

That's it. That summed it all up perfectly. No more needed to be said.

There is nothing better than hearing the genuine enthusiasm from players who have joined this team about how they believe they can win here and how they truly feel like they are where they belong.

Now, we just await Pesce's debut, which won't come in the first two games of the season, but he's back skating with teammates so hopefully that debut can happen very soon.

2.

Things I discovered during training camp? Paul Cotter has a unique pregame routine.

He plays Connect4 with his brother, and he has done so for years.

They play online; if you ask Paul about it, he says he never loses.

I asked what his strategy was, and he was dead serious when he told me he wouldn’t tell me.

The Connect4 pregame routine was built off of Cotter’s competitive spirit and dates back to his days well before the NHL.

Cotter would, however share the origin story of how it all got started:

"U16, Little Caesars in Detroit, we go on, like, a little retreat with our coach, Rob Cole, and he had this little Connect4 in his place in northern Michigan, and the whole team went through it, and no one beat him. And I was like, what? Like, what's wrong with this guy? Like, why can't we beat him? And so I must have looked stuff up for, like, a week or something, and at the end of the year, I was like, ‘Hey, if we make nationals, I want to play and Connect4.’, I don’t think that's probably the best thing to say to a coach when you're 16. And I beat him, I remember he was so annoyed. So now I have my little strategy.”

3.

I got some inside scoop on the Devils fantasy football scenario… I was chatting with Curtis Lazar the day after the players involved in fantasy football held their draft… he had a bone to pick… with none other than his favorite target, Luke Hughes.

I asked Lazar if he was happy with the team he drafted.

“Not really, actually. Okay, Luke poached a couple guys just before me, which put me panicking.”

I had to interrupt and ask if he was saying that to continue the beloved narrative of Curtis vs. Luke, but Lazar quickly interjected:

“No. I mean, I take a lot of pride in (fantasy football), I actually seem to be pretty good at it, but we’ll see where the chips fall.

(Yes, we’ll follow up on this in a future edition of 10 Takeaways!)

4.

Before training camp started, Stefan Noesen and his wife Alison hosted a Labor Day BBQ for several of the players who had already arrived in town. I loved hearing this from Noesen, who said he felt it was really important to start that process of getting to know everyone and getting the families together. That’s how you begin to start building the bond.

“Everyone's gonna be a couple of inches taller; you have more confidence in what you do, knowing that your teammates have your back,” Curtis Lazar, who is attending the get-together with his wife and two sons, said. “And that's also why this is important that (Stefan) Noesen already had a bunch of us to his place for a barbecue on Labor Day. It gets the families together, the kids, you build that camaraderie, and you become brothers, you are family throughout the season. And we're gonna have each other's back.”

5.

When Jacob Markstrom was traded to New Jersey this summer, he contacted Jesper Bratt. Bratt was also back home in Sweden, and the two got together for lunch to chat about Jersey.

Markstrom lives about an hour or so from Bratt and traveled this summer to see his newest teammate. Both Markstrom and Jesper offered some insight into what they talked about:

“We saw each other right after he got the call that he was traded.,” Bratt said. “I saw him for lunch. He came down to Stockholm. We had lunch together, we talked, and I could just see in his eyes how extremely excited he was to really come to this team, and that obviously made me extremely happy and excited to play with someone that just couldn't wait for the first puck drop.

“And he felt from last year for himself, that he's got a lot more in him, that he really felt like he had some kind of revenge. It fits for all of us, that we all have that hunger and that revenge feeling that we know that we're capable of so much more than what we have shown, so he fit perfectly into what we needed as a team”

“We both felt like we could sit like this for hours, which is so important, we have a really good connection. He’s an amazing guy and he’s going to light up the room a lot of times and he’s also going to be that voice in the room that we’re going to need.”

6.

Something else Pesce said he’s excited about? To be on the same side of the ice as Luke Hughes.

"I mean, you look at Luke (Hughes), this guy… I remember watching him, and we were playing the Devils last year in Carolina, and he was just skating around, going 100 miles an hour, and I was like, ‘Wow, this kid’s gonna be unbelievable’. So it’s cool that he’s on the back end. And then you have Simon (Nemec), he’s another one coming up there. He’s got so much potential, the guy is the limit for these guys. It’s cool to be a part of that."

There’s a lot of excitement in the Devils defensive core. As Brenden Dillon told me, “You just can’t have a bad partner here.”

Dillon heads into the season with a pretty special one, paired up with Dougie Hamilton all camp.

7.

A word I’ve heard a lot over the past three weeks has been ‘responsibility’. Coming into this season, given how last year went, and the amount of integral changes general manager Tom Fitzgerald made this summer, there’s a big sense of responsibility among the players to do right by their general manager and the work he has put in. And it’s not just from the returning players, it’s from those who he brought in to make the difference. They, too, feel that responsibility.

"He’s pushing, he wants to win. Fitzy wants to win," Jacob Markstrom shared. "I feel like everybody wants the same thing, it’s just how we get there. And I think he, as a GM, has done everything in his power to make sure that’s possible. You’ve got to see that and take responsibility and you’ve got to come together as a group and show your appreciation. It’s not easy.

“You can say a lot of things in life, right?,” newcomer Brenden Dillon added. “Or you can say that you want to get in shape, you can say that you want to eat healthier, you can say that you want to work hard. But until you actually go do it, like, it’s pretty easy to say it. So I think for Fitzy, and of course, I'm just getting to know him, but he's walked the walk that he said he's going to do. And I think for all of us as players, when someone shows belief in you and whether they show confidence in you, all the different things like you want to follow through with that."

8.

I loved Dillon's hypothetical team when he was summing up Fitzgerald's off-season pretty well: acquiring assets to make his team better. It was a well-rounded search, and Dillon joins a team now that has a true sense of everything.

"For our group, we know what our identity has been, and there's a strength of us, and I think we want to continue to have that, but also add to that. For the guys who were brought in, you know, hockey teams need all different types of personalities, they also need different types of skill levels and all different types of just hockey players. You need a mixed bag. If you can have… I'd like to think they'd be good .. but if you have twenty Connor McDavids, it's like you know, they'll be good but sometimes you do need a little bit of everything.”

9.

This summer, Jonas Siegenthaler hosted his first hockey camp in Thailand. Siegenthaler is of Thai descent, his mom is Thai, and in fact, his parents recently relocated to live full-time in Thailand. I spoke with Siegenthaler about what the experience was like.

"They're, they're really proud of me. I'm the first Thai NHL player," he said. "I don’t know when the next one is going to be, maybe 10 years? 20 years? The young kids there, they’re pretty good right now and they’re really good skill-wise, skating-wise. They’re actually, I would say better than kids in Switzerland. But their problem is they don’t have any games. That’s their main problem. They practice all week, skills. They don’t understand the game part as well. That’s the part that kind of stops them from developing to the next level."

Siegenthaler said there are roughly only 600 registered hockey players in Thailand with roughly four junior teams. He's hoping to find a way over the next few years to continue his camp and help the game grow to better heights but does say it's 'a difficult problem to solve'.

He shared this great story about a Q&A he had with the kids at the camp that really touched him.

"Some questions were so cute. It was this one little girl, she was sitting next to me in the locker room and she goes ‘Coach Siegs, one day I want to play in the NHL like you’. I was almost crying, you know it was just so, so nice.”

10.

The time has come for Seamus Casey to make his NHL debut. Head coach Sheldon Keefe confirmed it Thursday morning in Prague. The 20-year-old has done everything that's been asked of him during this camp and has made his case; heard loud and clear.

And what a way to enter the NHL -- on the Global Series stage in Prague. Casey will be just the 5th rookie to make their NHL debut at one of these international games since it was rebranded at the Global Series games in 2010. Overall, 36 players in NHL history have made their NHL debut outside of North America, but since the rebranding, Casey will become just the 5th.