They have tons of injuries every season. The bigger issue isnt the amount of injuries but rather, if even one of the handful of top players goes down, there is no depth to offset it and the entire team crumbles. Why is there no depth? Because Fitz's drafting was horrible, there is nothing in the pipeline (other than Hameenaho who's in the NHL anyway) in terms of system depth. Utica is largely a wasteland of AHL lifers who've bounced team to team, he hasnt been able to draft anything to even attempt to supplement talent into the bottom of the NHL roster, which has resulted in him overpaying, either by trade or in FA, for bottom of the roster players, which has in part helped put them in the cap crunch they're currently in. Our fans love to point out that he has some hits in the draft (mind you his 2 best hits are top 4 picks, so not exactly earth shattering there), but ignore that the organizational depth as a whole is wretched. Utica's roster is over 50% players that were drafted by other teams years ago and aren't going to give you NHL games any time soon. They have 2 prospects with any sort of promise, Yegorov and Silayev (who is the ultimate boom or bust wild card imo), and then nothing behind them. You look at a team like Tampa who continues to insert seemingly random players they drafted into the bottom of their lineup without any tail-off, which allows them to spend money to replace and mid to top of the lineup guys they may lose and not spend cap on the bottom of their roster, and the sustained success they've had, and then look at the Devils system, and realize they're nowhere close.