Mehta Analysis | COLUMN

“A GM has many responsibilities. We have to deal with the media. We have to create a culture. We have to manage up. We have to negotiate with agents. But it’s somewhat safe to say that the main objective is that we have to put a winning team on the ice. I take that seriously.”

Those words were spoken by Sunny Mehta - who was named the sixth general manager in Devils history last Thursday - at an introductory press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

“To me, putting a winning team on the ice, that function of a general manager is about decision making,” he continued. “Taking in information of all different sorts, assessing risk and making decisions, and decisions you know are going to have inherent uncertainty with them.”

Mehta’s unique background has armed him with the tools to execute on that risk assessment framework. From his time as a professional high stakes poker player, to his time as a Proprietary Derivatives Trader at Peak6 Capital Management, to his time winning back-to-back Stanley Cups with the Florida Panthers front office – including serving the past three as assistant general manager – Mehta knows how to hit the jackpot.

Mehta's process has served him well and garnered him success at every stop of his career and in very different modalities.

“I have studied making decisions under the cloud of risk for the past 25 years,” Mehta said. “First as a poker player, then as an options trader, and for the past 15 years as a hockey executive.”

Now, Mehta brings his philosophy and vision to New Jersey. With little time to exhale, he has a lot of decisions to make in the near term. He will be going through a “period of assessment of all players, coaches and staff.”

But on the outset, he has a lot of belief in the team’s current foundation.

“I’m extremely optimistic about this team,” he said. “We have a lot of talented players, and I really, truly believe that these talented players are about to hit an inflection point and get over that hurdle. It’s my job to make sure that this roster is consistently flush with the necessary amount of talent to be a championship team.

“And I intend to do that.”

The A Word

When the Devils announced on April 6 that the organization and Tom Fitzgerald would part ways, the process began to find a new general manager.

One of the names that kept popping up was Florida assistant GM Sunny Mehta. He had previously worked for the Devils from 2014-18. In that time, he established the NHL’s first full-time hockey analytics department with New Jersey as Director of Hockey Analytics. He brought a data-centric and process-oriented vision to support the team in scouting, draft preparation and player evaluation.

When Mehta’s name was floated as the next potential GM of the Devils, a lot of the conversation swirled around his analytics background. However, that type of thinking is missing the forest for the trees.

“I totally understand why I get put in that analytics bucket, labeled as the analytics guy. But if you look at my path, my background, even my own path to analytics is different than the typical analytics person in sports,” he said. “I never set out to be in academia or be a mathematician. Truly, where I learned statistics was on the job, at the poker table, on the trading floor and at the hockey front offices. To me, the reason that I ever cared about analytics, statistics, probability, was because it helped me win. It helped me win in poker. It helped me win on the trading floor. It helped me win in hockey. That’s why I care about it.”

To Mehta, who also worked with the Phoenix Coyotes and Washington Capitals previously, analytics only play a role in the overall process of evaluation and decision making.

“The blending, of course that’s important. The same way that in poker it’s not just numbers,” Mehta said. “You have to have a feel for your opponent. You have to understand the subjectivity of bluffing. You have to understand the psychology. The same thing was true for trading. You have to have a feel for markets. You have to understand how news affects things, subjectivity, human emotion.

“Yes, data does undoubtedly give a huge advantage in hockey in terms of projecting future performance of players. But you have to understand all those same things. The character. The locker room. The culture. The intangibles. All that stuff matters.”

Tight and Aggressive

Using analytics is about one thing, creating a competitive advantage. Whether in poker, trading or hockey, your goal is sway the odds in your favor by any means necessary.

“You have to focus on the process. You have to be really, really good at improving the odds, so to speak,” Mehta said. “Everything we do is, you can think of it as a bet, and we want to increase the probability of that bet over, and over, and over again.

“And then, you have to almost somewhat ignore short-term results and just focus on your process and have the guts to stick with it and to know and be objective that you're making the right decisions and just keep doing it over and over again and know that success will follow.”

Some of Mehta’s poker philosophy does spill over into his hockey operations philosophy. It’s the idea of playing ‘tight and aggressive.’

“Most successful long-term poker players are what in the business we call tight and aggressive, which means in some ways, you're more patient than other poker players in the sense that you don't play garbage cards,” he said. “You have the discipline and the patience to wait for your moment. But when you have that moment, you're extremely, extremely aggressive. You have to have the guts to do what it takes when that moment is right to win the hand, and I'd say that's exactly kind of how I view this.”

Sunny Came Home

Make no mistake, Sunny Mehta was made in Jersey. Though born in Michigan, he moved to New Jersey with his family in 1982 – the same year the Devils arrived in the Garden State.

As a child, his mother would take him to the Devils practice rink in Totowa. One memory stands out to him from when he was 7 years old.

“I remember a puck came over the glass. I was looking around for it, I was just a little kid,” he said. “Then I saw it and I went to go grab it and a bigger kid came and snatched it before I could go get it. But Chico Resch saw the whole thing. He was on the ice as goaltender, and he motioned to my mom. So, she picked me up over the glass and he reached over and gave me a puck. That was definitely an awesome moment.”

And with that, Mehta was a Devils fan for life. He followed the team through its miraculous 1988 playoff run to the heartbreak of 1994 to watching his team lift the Stanley Cup three times – the third time he saw in person in 2003.

“This is where I’ve always wanted to be,” he said. “This is where I grew up.

“This is my heart.”

Mehta even had a special - and honest - message for Devils fans.

“I’d really, really like to thank the Devils fans. I’ve heard, read and felt your support in recent times here and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it,” he said. “As many of you know, I have been you for 40 years. It’s really not an exaggeration when I tell you this is my dream job. I grew up 20 miles from here. I played high school hockey in New Jersey. I’ve been following this team since I was a small kid.

“I’m up here in this (GM) chair now. There’s no doubt in my mind that there will be times when the fans disagree with me. And there will be times when they question my decisions, but the things they’ll never be able to question are my sincerity, my passion and my loyalty to this franchise.”

Control the Process

Mehta won the Stanley Cup with the Panthers in 2024 and ’25. And on both occasions, on his day with the Cup he brought it to New Jersey.

In 2024 he brought the Cup to Ramapo High School in Franklin Lakes, where he played high school hockey. Last year, he brought the Cup to Hockey in New Jersey and Ice Hockey in Harlem.

“I think as happy as everybody was, I definitely got a lot of chirps, ‘You’re bringing this here with Florida, why don’t you bring it here with New Jersey?’” he laughed. “I’ve kept that in the back of my mind.”

Ultimately, that’s what drives Mehta.

“What drives me most is there's obviously just no better feeling than lifting that Stanley Cup. It's indescribable,” he said.

Winning a championship may be the end goal. But it isn’t the only goal. When Mehta was asked by a media member if the Devils will be in a position to contend for a Stanley Cup in the short term or if it’s a longer-term project, Mehta responded: “Both.”

“That’s my honest answer. That's how I have to approach this,” he continued. “I absolutely think we have pieces. We have the framework to win right away. But I also very much care about the long term. My goal is to instill a process that's repeatable over and over and over again so that the success is sustained. So, to me, it's not one or the other. It's absolutely both.”

But he also understands that 31 teams every year have their season end in disappointment.

“Look, winning's hard,” he said. “In some ways, there's a lot of parallels to poker in this, where you can kind of do everything right and still lose. It's a lesson you have to learn as a poker player, where you can study the game, you can do everything right, you can get your money in as an 80/20 favorite, and you're going to lose. You're supposed to lose 20 percent of the time. And I think there are a lot of parallels to hockey. And the learning lesson there is that you just have to focus on what you can control.”

For Mehta, what he and his staff aim to control is instilling the right process.

“My goal for this front office is quite simple,” he said. “I want to make smart, objective and educated decisions, and I want to do it over and over and over again. For that reason, I believe I am the right person to implement that agenda given my past experiences and successes.”