The New Jersey Devils finished building Sheldon Keefe’s bench on Wednesday, announcing four additions to the coaching and development staff: Ted Donato and AJ MacLean as assistant coaches, Dan Stewart as goaltending coach and Leo Luongo as director of goaltending.
Donato is the headline hire. He arrives after 22 seasons as head coach at Harvard, where he left as the winningest coach in program history with 334 victories, eight NCAA Tournament appearances, a 2017 Frozen Four berth and four ECAC titles. College coaches who jump straight to an NHL bench are still rare, but Donato has NHL playing credentials — over 700 games — and two decades of running his own program. He has spent his career teaching transition habits to teenagers; now he gets a roster already built to play fast.
MacLean is the connective tissue. He and Keefe won a Calder Cup together with the AHL’s Toronto Marlies in 2018, and he spent the last three seasons as an assistant with the Syracuse Crunch, Tampa Bay’s affiliate. Keefe’s systems ask forwards to support the puck in motion rather than stand still on the wall, and MacLean has coached that structure at the developmental level for years.
The goaltending department was rebuilt outright. Stewart comes over after six seasons in the St. Louis organization, where he served as a development coach and goalie coach for the AHL’s Springfield Thunderbirds. Luongo, the new director of goaltending, spent the last decade with Florida and owns two Stanley Cup rings from the Panthers’ 2024 and 2025 championships. Hiring both a bench-level goalie coach and a department head above him mirrors the structure the league’s best-run crease operations use — Florida’s among them.
The announcement closes out an offseason in which New Jersey overhauled the support structure around its core rather than the core itself. Keefe now has his full staff in place with training camp roughly two months out, and the assignments — who runs the power play, who takes the penalty kill — will be worth watching when camp opens.
For fantasy purposes, the interesting name is Luongo: a goaltending department rebuilt by people from the Panthers’ back-to-back Cup infrastructure is a quiet positive for whoever starts the bulk of games in the New Jersey crease, and Keefe’s track record of top-10 power plays in Toronto keeps the Devils’ skill players’ man-advantage value steady heading into drafts.
