The Sheet with Jeff Marek - On the Sheet: Sunny Mehta

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Jeff Marek is joined by Sunny Mehta — the new General Manager of the New Jersey Devils — for an in-depth conversation on stepping into his first GM role, building a modern front office, and blending analytics with the traditional eye test to shape a winning roster. Mehta reflects on his Florida Panthers Stanley Cup experience, what he learned from that championship run, and how those lessons will influence his first moves in New Jersey as he begins to put his stamp on the organization.Reach out to [e-mail] to connect with our Sales Team and discuss opportunities to partner with us!If you liked this, check out:🚨 OTT - Coming in Hot Sens | https://www.youtube.com/c/thewallyandmethotshow🚨 TOR - LeafsNation | https://www.youtube.com/@theleafsnation401🚨 EDM - OilersNation | https://www.youtube.com/@Oilersnationdotcom🚨 VAN - CanucksArmy | https://www.youtube.com/@Canucks_Army🚨 CGY - FlamesNation | https://www.youtube.com/@Flames_Nation🚨 Daily Faceoff Fantasy & Betting | www.youtube.com/@DFOFantasyandBetting____________________________________________________________________________________________Connect with us on ⬇️Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/daily_faceoff💻 Website: https://www.dailyfaceoff.com🐦 Follow on twitter: https://x.com/DailyFaceoff💻 Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailyfaceoffDaily Faceoff Merch:https://nationgear.ca/collections/daily-faceoff Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the meantime, back to the NHL. And we're joined now by the general manager of the New Jersey Devils. Sonny Mehta, who joins me here on the sheet. Sunny, first of all, a belated congratulations. And I wanted to open up by asking about, have you had your, okay, so now I'm a general manager moment yet. So Brian Burke told me the first time he realized he was a general manager. He was trying to make a trade with Lou Lamarillo of New Jersey.

I believe you've heard of him before. And it was the Sean Brueck. Burke Eric Weinrich trade for Bobby Hole leak and he said it was my first trade and it was just me and the phone in my office There's no assistant general managers. There's no big huge support staff and he said they picked up the phone to call Lou and got nervous and hung up He waited a little bit and he picked up the phone again Wasn't sure this is my first trade and they hung up and he walked around the building and then came back in and Finally after however many attempts he was finally able to call Lou Lamarillo and go through with the trade. Have you had your, I'm a general manager yet moment, Sonny? Doesn't have necessarily

have to be a trade, obviously. I don't know if I have. I don't think it's hit me yet. I still don't, you know, in part, like the timing of everything was so quick. I've just gotten thrown right into the fire that I don't know if it has hit me. It may not hit me until July. So, but when there's actually some downtime. Um, I, you know, there's a, there's a lot to get to here with the New Jersey Devils and with you as well. One of the things that I'm curious about, like you grew up a New Jersey Devils fan. Like your story by now has been well told and it's great. And everybody knows your background and how you got to the position you're at now.

What I'm curious about is when you were working with the Florida Panthers, would you always have in the back of your mind, if I ran the Devils, this is what I would do? Or if I, like, do managers think that way? Like, oh, if I had a hand on the wheel in New Jersey, this is what? what I would do. Or is it just 24-7? I'm focused on the Florida Panthers, and that's it. Okay, so here's how I'll answer that question, Jeff.

So I think the very first time I started working for an NHL team was in 2010 when I was, did a year consulting with the Phoenix Coyotes, and the person who was leading that group at the time, Matt Hullsizer. I remember specifically the very first time that Phoenix played New Jersey, and he knew I had grown up a Devils fan or whatever. And I remember the first time Phoenix played New Jersey, he kind of jokingly asked me, he was like, hey, who are you rooting for tonight?

And I remember my response to him, my response to him was the exact same response to my paraphrased what Susan Sarandon says in Bull Durham, where I said, sweetheart, would you rather me sleeping with him and calling your name or sleeping with you and calling his name? That's a great point. I never thought we'd hear that on this program, but there it is.

I am curious, too, because one of the things about hockey is everybody fancies themselves a general manager. Well, this is what I would do if I ran this team, whatever. Is there, like when you get the big chair position, is there a temptation, a desire to do something right away? Like, sometimes the smartest thing is to not do anything and just don't be in the way. But I'm always curious about what happens when you get the gig. Is there sort of like a magnetic pull to like, okay, I've got all these ideas. I've got to start doing things. Does that exist?

It's a good question. I mean, obviously I've only been in the chair for a week and a half or whatever. So it hasn't been very long. I don't know that I'm, I don't know that I'm thinking, oh, I need to do something to do something. But, I mean, I'm definitely sort of, it's hard to turn my brain off, right, in terms of you want to do everything you can be doing. You want to be, I mean, listen, I want to win. That's the most important thing, right? I want to make the team better.

I want to win. So that aspect is there. but I don't think it's a, I wouldn't phrase it in terms of like doing something just to do something. Right. But I mean, I would imagine like you take this position and there's a number of things you would like to do. Like is there a sort of an appropriate amount of time you sort of wait to,

you know, get your roots a little deeper and make sure you're on solid footing before you do do something? I'm just sort of curious about like the process of starting to get the ball rolling when you first take over a take over. take over a new position with a new team? No, I think it's pretty immediate. You know, I just think that there's, I mean, we're sort of bound by the timeline of the NHL season, right?

So, I mean, regardless of what I want to say or what timeline I want to be working on, I mean, July 1st is July 1st and the draft is coming when the draft is coming in the lotteries next week. So I'm, you know, have kind of hit the ground running already. And I think the timeline will take care of itself when, when the time is right, things will happen. How do you see this team right now? Like, we look at the New Jersey Devils and say it's a team that's loaded with talent.

I know it was in the best of all possible seasons for New Jersey, a number of reasons for that. I would imagine right up around the top of the list of Jack Hughes injury. But like, what do you see when you see the New Jersey Devils right now? Let me, actually, let me frame it this way. Let me frame it this way. Does it exist in a state of potentiality or actuality? both yeah the rare situation that i think is both i think this is i mean i think no matter what

team for me personally right the way i would view it is no matter what team i were going to i would always have the long term in mind i mean i would think any general manager going into a situation is thinking i'm not just here for the now but i'm here to install a process still a process that will have long-term ramifications to set up long-term success. So that's there, but then I also just think that this team in particular has, you know, a lot of talent, a lot of weapons, and I think there is a chance to have short-term and long-term success. That's my goal.

The team that you want to construct or the team that you want to sort of build on here to get to a place that reflects how you think a hockey team should be built. What qualities and characteristics do those players have to have? And I'll frame it this way. I was talking to Sean Walker on the program yesterday. We're talking about what do you have to, like, what kind of player do you have to be to play for the Carolina hurricanes? Like, A, you have to be athletic, B, you have to think, like the way that Brindamore plays and the way that Tulsi, you know, the way the Tulsi believes team should be constructed.

Like there are certain players that can play there and certain players that can't. What are the characteristics that you would see for players that you say this player could be a new Jersey devil? I don't know that for me is necessarily a stylistic thing. I'm pretty matter of fact about the issue that the point in hockey is to win. And you win by outscoring the other team. And you can do that by allowing fewer goals and you can do that by scoring more. goals. And frankly, what I want is I want to outscore the other team. I want players who help us outscore the other team. I want a roster full of players that in the aggregate

outscore other teams. And I think there's a lot of different ways to do that. I don't think there is one way to do that. I mean, we had a pretty idiosyncratic style in Florida, obviously, but I don't think that's the only way to win. I mean, we've seen that, right? I mean, Chicago Blackhawks under Joel Quenville and that group played a certain way. Tampa Bay played a completely different style than us and they

won two Stanley Cup. So for me it's less about style and it's more about the end result, which is I want to win. I can recall having a conversation with one general manager a few years ago and his team, this is someone that has a

sort of a, for lack of a better term, an analytic slant to how this person sees the game, even though really that war is over. Everybody looks at it from that point of view. It's information. But for the purposes of this conversation, I'll use that description. And I was pointing out, yeah, you know what?

You're going through a slump right now. The last few months, blah, blah, blah. But these numbers look good. And that and you know all this, and this looks good. And this manager stopped me and said, that's all fine and good and we read all that. But then at a certain point, like life has to start. Like, you get off the page and life begins

and the games get played. Does that resonate with you? I don't know. I don't know if I know exactly what you're getting at. What do you mean by... What I'm getting at here is what this manager was trying to say to me, well, that's fine and good, and you can feed me all the stuff about underlying numbers,

but at the end of the day, like to your point, we're here to win hockey games. And I'm not feeling better about myself because my process is good, or I'm not getting my name on the Stanley Cup because our underlying numbers are better than anyone else's in the NBA. HL. Yeah, that's a tough thing. That's a tough thing because in the end, you care about the result. Everyone cares about the result. I guess I would say that in part because of the things that

my path to get to where I am and the things that I've done in my life the last 20 years or whatever, and including the last, well, probably 25 years or whatever, but including the last 15 years even in hockey, I think I'm a little bit probably different than most in terms of, really, really trying to focus on the process and really, really trying to ignore short-term results if I feel that there's nothing predictive in them. And I think even if you probably talk to some of my colleagues in Florida, they would laugh about just my demeanor when watching games and things like that. I mean, for example, I can remember people constantly ask me how nervous I was during the first time

we won the Stanley Cup in that series that went seven games against Edmonton. And I can honestly recall I really wasn't that nervous. And part of the reason was because, like, I remember thinking, well, prior to the series, we had about a 57% chance to win. We won game one. It went up to, I don't know, probably 67. Game two, we won. It went up to 77.

We went up to game three. It probably went up to somewhere around 89, something like that. And at each step of the way, like, it was just a continuum where I saw that probability never hitting 100 and never going to zero. And in fact, the funny thing is, as nerve-wracking as game 7 was, we were never an underdog because they never had the lead in the series or even in game 7, Edmonton never had the lead. So at any point, at every single point in that series, we're above 50% to win. So I guess my brain just wouldn't let me get, quote, unquote, too nervous or too away from thinking in that way. And I guess, like, it's just hard for me not to think in that way because it's ingrained in me. That's a really comfortable way to watch sports.

I don't know that, like, like, bless you. Like, that's like, you look at the numbers and it becomes your moments of Zen. Like, everything's fine. Look at this. This is fine. Everything is good here. I want to ask you about a couple things. One, no trades, no moves.

When you look at your roster, this is one of the things that people have pointed at and said, like, see, it feels at least like New Jersey is frozen. When you look at the no moves, no trades in your lineup, on your roster, what goes through your mind? It's not something that I've really spent a ton of time getting hung up on. no moves and no trades are obviously like first of all they're part of the cost of doing business and you know whether or not we have more or less or whether we should or shouldn't have i mean a lot of that was in the past it was before i got here so there's no point in even really sort of

spending too much time thinking about that for me when i just look at the roster and i look at our cap situation and whether it's you know whether it's the cap the no moves like just everything pertaining to our our sort of asset base um I'm optimistic, you know. I think there's, I think we're going to have to be creative. I think we're going to have to find creative solutions to things in, in terms of improving the roster. But I'm,

I'm sort of up for that challenge. I'm game for that. And I'm excited for it, to be honest. How soon, and maybe you already have, do you open a conversation with Nico Heeshire? I've,

yeah, it was basically day two that that conversation started. again, not necessarily just in terms of like a contract or something like that. It's more just that, I mean, I know Nico because I was here when we drafted him. And he was a great kid then and he's a great young man now. And so it was one of the first calls I made was to reach out to him. I met him for coffee basically the second day that I was here just to, you know, kind of get with my captain and talk to him.

And it was great. He's a great guy. he's a great player. And yeah, I'm looking forward to continuing those conversations. This is a sort of wide-reaching question. And I don't know, there's one specific answer. I think we all have a different idea on it. But you're talking to someone when you got hired who said,

okay, now this is the tipping point. This is the tipping point for people like, and I don't want to lump you in with a group, but for lack of a better group to be put with the Kyle Dubus's and the Eric Tulskis. And that someone said like, okay, sunny is the tipping point. As far as using analytics, I mean, that, I mean, every team, every team does to varying degrees of success. But nobody is bereft of it. When did the tipping point happen?

Or do you feel like potentially, because we see what Toronto is doing now and everything that was laid out by Keith Pelley, do you see yourself getting hired as a tipping point for this next sort of wave or version of what a general manager is in the NHL? The way that I've looked at at Sunny is it feels like everything is changing from did you play to can you think? Baseball went through this 30 years ago and now hockey's getting there now. Does it feel that way to you? Yeah, it's hard to say about the tipping point because I don't think anyone knows the answer to that, right? Like we could look back. It's kind of only something you know in retrospect, right?

Like we may look back and say this was a tipping point. We may look back and say, no, it wasn't. I mean, in fairness, there's been a ton of times in things that have happened, you know, things in the industry that have transgressed over the last 10, 15 years where I might have at the time thought, well, this is definitely going to be a tipping point. And then it turned out it wasn't, right? So I think knowing exactly what the tipping point is is hard, Jeff. but I definitely still agree with your sort of general sentiment there, which is, I mean, I think this has just been happening over time, right?

I mean, even you look now compared to 10 years ago, honestly, even if you look 10 years ago compared to the 10 years before that, it was significantly different, right? I mean, so 10 years ago today was still 2016. Well, at that point in time, there were at least already some analytics staffs. They were already analytics, like teams doing more with numbers, teams doing more with metrics and doing more with information and technology, certainly than they were 10 years before that. Like there was probably a bigger jump between 2006 and 2016 than there was between 2016 and now. So I don't know. I mean, it's kind of one of those things where it's probably not linear, right? Like there's been change happening.

It's been growing and growing and growing and knowing the exact sort of slope and trajectory of that. curve is kind of hard to predict. Okay, something I want to close with here, and I want to be the only person or the first person that's ever asked you about this on a hockey show. For me, the answer is McCoy Tyner's solo on my favorite things. What's your favorite moment of any John Coltrane composition? I had to ask a Coltrane question. Sorry, Sonny.

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. So, all right, I'll go a little bit off the cuff here, or a little, you know, a little off the deep path. Possibly my favorite Coltrane record is actually a Miles record. You know, obviously, like, those great Miles Davis bands in the 50s, the first iteration was, I think, his quartet or his quintet, and then it was the sex tet, if I'm remembering correctly.

The first one had, didn't have cannonball, and the second one did. But obviously, everyone knows kind of blue and some of those famous records. but there's a Miles Davis record called the 58 Sessions. And to me, it's like one of the best jazz records of all time. Coltrane's playing's amazing. Miles is amazing. Bill Evans is amazing. Cannonball is incredible.

Like, it's just a fantastic record. I highly recommend you check it out if you haven't. I just love being part of a conversation. The reference is Cannonball Adderly. It just completely made my day, Sonny. That was awesome. A belated, congratulations again. Thanks so much for taking time.

I know he's super busy. So thanks for carving out some time. for me here today. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate you, buddy. Have a good day.