When his name popped up on Thursday's waiver wire, Stefan Noesen stood out.
Noesen is an experienced NHL player, the kind that doesn't usually get hung out on waivers for a potential claim by another team.
But that's what the New Jersey Devils did on Thursday. They decided they didn't have space for Noesen on their current NHL roster, and so they waived him.
If he clears waivers, Noesen can report to the AHL. But teams across the league will have 24 hours to place a claim on him.
The Devils won't know until 2 p.m. ET on Friday whether Noesen remains in their organization or not.
Given his solid career pedigree, Noesen very well could be picked up by someone else.
The first reason that relates most directly to this point in time is that the Devils haven't found a use for Noesen so far this season.
They've played three games, and Noesen was a scratch for one while averaging 7 minutes and 24 seconds of ice time in the other two. That's a tough player to justify keeping around.
Noesen had begun his apparent decline a bit last season when he had just three goals and four assists in 38 games for New Jersey.
The year before, he played in 78 games and had 22 goals and 19 assists in his first season with the Devils.
New Jersey has shifted away from Noesen first last year and now this year — his playing time dropped by more than four minutes per game from 2024-25 to 2025-26 — and now they've made this potentially full split.
They likely also wouldn't mind if someone else took Noesen's contract off their hands. He's got a cap hit of $2.75 million this season, and it's the final year of his deal. That's not a crazy number, but it's not useful to the Devils if they don't want to pay Noesen.
Noesen entered the NHL as a first-round pick by the Ottawa Senators in the 2011 NHL Draft at No. 21 overall
He was actually born in the state of Texas, rare roots for an NHL player.
He never played for the Senators, though. His NHL debut came with the Anaheim Ducks, for whom he played parts of three seasons.
He then got his first three-season stint with the Devils — topping out at 27 points (13 goals, 14 assists in 72 games) in 2017-18.
From there, Noesen played six games with the Pittsburgh Penguins, then 39 across two seasons with the San Jose Sharks, then a single game with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Noesen got parts of three seasons with the Carolina Hurricanes after that, peaking at 37 points in 81 games in 2023-24 with 14 goals and 23 assists.
After that year, he signed his current contract to come back to New Jersey. It was a reasonable deal at the time for a player who also has three seasons of 100-plus hits in his career, but Noesen's usefulness declined pretty quickly for the Devils, and now they seem content to move on.
This article was originally published on HEAVY
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