The New Jersey Devils are supposed to be entering their contention phase now, which could have disastrous impacts on their drafting philosophy if they begin to prioritize depth over high-end talent.
Before the NHL Draft begins on Friday night, I would like to discuss drafting philosophy with everyone here at All About the Jersey. This may serve as a bit of a Draft preview, though I will be out with a few more prospect profiles by Friday.
Yesterday, the team released this peek into their scouting meetings. You will hear some people talking about “being able to play” versus “the guys analytics are bringing in.” So, there does seem to be a fair bit of disagreement between the Devils’ analytics department and the traditional “hockey men” in the room. In this video, they discuss drafting for ceiling versus drafting for floors, drafting for coachability, and playoff teams having identity. It is a pretty cool look into the organization.
I did not write the entirety of this article specifically in response to this release. In fact, I already had the article titled and one of the below sections written out by the time it was put out on the team’s media accounts. But I am responding to what I heard in the first section below.
The Shero Doctrine: Drafting the Next All-Star or Hall of Famer
After decades of being run by Lou Lamoriello, the New Jersey Devils did not have a prospect pipeline to speak of in 2015. In fact, they barely had an NHL team to speak of, doomed to be dragged to the outer bubble by Cory Schneider, Andy Greene, Travis Zajac, and Adam Henrique from year to year until they traded for Taylor Hall. This gave them a taste of the playoffs, and it would have been all too easy to turn and say, we’re out of the rebuild forever, let’s start trading draft picks away for immediate help. Let’s look for some depth to help Taylor Hall out in the draft.
Ray Shero did not build his teams by copying what he saw around him, though. He believed that, more than anything, the greatest accumulation of talent would set them up for success. Paul Castron said to Abbey Mastracco back in June 2018:
“Great players come out of the draft in the sixth or seventh round still. Really, they’re just a number and they’re just a round,” Castron said. “It really means nothing and we tell the kids that. It’s about what they do and what we do to help them after they’re drafted is the key. It’s what you do with them and the culture you create inside the organization to help them develop.”
With the New Jersey Devils possessing a bunch of mid-round picks in the 2025 Draft, they could very well fall into the trap of drafting for a safe floor: your fourth liners and bruising third pairing or extra defensemen. When you have people in the organization questioning the analytics department for bringing them a possible diamond in the rough, preferring a guy who will top out as any generic fourth liner a team can sign in unrestricted free agency every year, that is how you end up limiting the team’s window of contention.
I think that some people who were recorded in the video the Devils released who did embody, in whole or part, the Shero Doctrine of Drafting. Dan MacKinnon, one of the team’s Assistant General Managers, called for the room to think about solidifying a team identity, getting the team to a level where it can keep a core in place and just move supporting pieces in and out — as the best teams do. Matt Cane, the team’s Vice President of Hockey Analytics and Strategy, asked everyone to remember how difficult it is to find players of a high caliber.
The truth is that free agency is very expensive when it comes to high-end players. Even fourth liners get overpaid relative to the value they provide against the cap. Very often, the teams that get deep in the playoffs have players on their ELCs or bridge contracts who are providing above that dollar value. Look at Wyatt Johnston on Dallas, or Florida with Mackie Samoskevich (even if he was iced out of the playoff roster) on an ELC and Anton Lundell on an extreme underpay of a contract. If the Devils take a swing on a player in the second round who looks raw, but has the two-way ceiling to be a top six forward, they might just score 25 goals next to Jack Hughes in 2028 en route to a Stanley Cup appearance. But if the Devils look for the next Chase Stillman, the next physical fourth liner, to be one of their top selections, the Draft will almost certainly be a failure. Because Stillman, a high floor, low ceiling player, regressed in his second AHL season, and I would not be surprised if Pittsburgh ended up sending him to the ECHL next season.
Instead of thinking, is this guy the next Paul Cotter or Miles Wood?, ask, is this guy the next Jesper Bratt? Is this guy the next (prime) Ondrej Palat? Is this guy the next Brett Pesce? Here is another thing: there is more than one way to be valuable enough to a team to get top six or top pairing minutes. Jesper Bratt does it by being a two-way playmaking speed demon with a lot of lower-body strength. Ondrej Palat did it by being one of the best-detailed players in the league in Tampa. Brett Pesce does it by playing a style of defense that doesn’t rock the body or blast a ton of slap shots from the point, but by being great at covering all three zones and playing defensive hockey up and down the ice.
A prospect does not have to be a sniper to project into the top six. They could be a guy who plays a tight, solid game from end-to-end, but is not anything more than above-average from a physical standpoint. They could be a huge, barreling power forward with good hockey IQ and average hands. If the production is there, he can play those minutes, even if the goals are not as pretty as the 5’10” sniper who looks like he cannot play professional defense but relies on his smarts to get by. And even then, looking at size is just part of the physical picture. There are levels to fitness and athleticism, and it’s easy to identify a guy who can be a wrecking ball at 6’4”. It might not be as intuitive to identify the next Brad Marchand, who will use his lower body strength to flip defensemen half a foot taller than himself over his rear-end for years and years.
In the video, Tom Fitzgerald said that part of the matter is coaching. If a player is coachable, they can make it in the league. I think a lot of the answer lies there: the team needs to be mindful of their player development. It is not just what the player is now, but all the things that the team teaches them that matters. I just revisited a recent article from Jack Han, “Advice for 2025 NHL Draftees,” that I had read a couple weeks ago, because one part really stuck out to me
On one hand, every team wants prospects to gain muscle mass and improve their defensive play. It’s cliché but mandatory.
On the other, few players carve out lasting and lucrative NHL careers without having at least one high-end attribute, deployed at a high frequency (i.e. an identity).
Han goes on to write that over-prioritizing fixing weaknesses can be a threat to a player’s identity, and argues that it is more lucrative for a player and a team to round out strong points. When it comes to players on the New Jersey Devils today, I worry about players like Dawson Mercer. When Mercer came into the league, he was coming off of multiple seasons of being one of the best transition puck movers in the CHL — one of the best playmakers. Coming into the league at 19 years old, Mercer’s passing and cycle game was already on point, but he has had 30 assists over the last two seasons combined after having 54 in his first two.
Thankfully, Mercer’s goal scoring has not dried up, otherwise my tone about him would have really shifted, but I feel like Mercer has been progressively losing that playmaking aspect of his game. I increasingly ask myself if Mercer has been asked to stray too far from the identity he had as a prospect. He had a good defensive year, but I am not even remotely worried about his defense. I am worried about whether he can drive offense. I find myself worried thinking about Alex Holtz, who failed trying to round out his game so much that he completely dried up as an offensive threat. I think about Simon Nemec, who played through a hellish season before having to let him loose in the playoffs gave him the room to remind everyone what he was capable of.
So when I hear Meghan Duggan, the team’s Director of Player Development, mention prospects having a flexible mindset so they might be able to become a different kind of player if they cannot make it with the skills they have now, I just hope that the video they released did not all that fairly represent them. I do not think it would be good practice to draft players with the idea of changing them. Round them out? Sure. But changing identities is a road to nowhere. The team needs to get back to drafting for the guy who can be something more in the matured mold of who they are now. If you give a coach a team of guys who are among the best at what they do, the team will almost certainly be a contender if the coach knows what he is doing.
“Need” is Ephemeral at Best in the Middle Rounds
The New Jersey Devils need a third-line center. The New Jersey Devils need a goaltending plan. The New Jersey Devils need a big, physical winger. The New Jersey Devils need a sniper. The New Jersey Devils seem to need, this, that, and everything all the time.
The truth is that the New Jersey Devils in 2025 are drafting for players that can best help the team between, roughly, 2028 and 2035. Mark Dennehy, the Devils’ current Chief Scout in the Amateur Scouting department, hit on this well in the video near the top of the page. This draft is not about helping the team tomorrow, it’s about being able to win Stanley Cups five years from now. So, sure, the team needs a third-line center. But do you anticipate that the issues with the roster will be the same four or five years from now as they stand today? In the prospect profiles I have done this year (and most of the names I talked about with James and Jackson), I have looked for players who not only have a lot of video available, but either have high production or have been noted for having a high-end physical tool. Whether it’s straight-line speed, agility, strength, endurance, or a combination thereof, I reason that the Devils will always need athletically-gifted players who might be able to grow into a top-six or middle-pairing role.
I think that the team having such a good core allows them to really zero in on the “best player available” philosophy. I can understand a contender with, say, the 23rd overall pick choosing a type of player they will need in the next year or two. I cannot say I understand trying to use a 6th round selection in the same manner. If I am expecting these prospects to take years, I would want the team to mostly discard positional concerns. Just making sure to get a center with one of the first couple picks would be a good idea. Beyond that? BPA all day.
Great Prospects From Overseas Can Have Misleading Numbers
Something I have learned in looking at these prospects is that teams and fans alike often fail to put enough stock into European junior leagues. One such example of this I have seen is Igor Chernyshov, a prospect from the 2024 Draft. When I profiled him, I found myself really enjoying his possession skills and skating ability, along with a strong build and unshakable confidence on the puck. I enjoyed seeing that in a video of his play in the KHL — but he only had four points in 34 games there, along with 28 points in 22 junior games. Those Russian junior league numbers gave him some rather high (i.e. lottery-level) projection numbers on Hockey Prospecting, by Byron Bader. I wrote,
Of all the players I have profiled so far, including Marek Vanacker from this morning, Chernyshov is the only guy I would say absolutely needs to be in consideration at tenth overall. The New Jersey Devils are always chasing power forwards to add to their collection, and Chernyshov’s KHL tape shows a lot of maturity in his game. Combining that with his production in the MHL, this is a top-15 prospect.
I did not get the vibe from commenters that they would be very happy with selecting him at 10th overall, and he did actually fall out of the first round — to the Sharks, at 33rd. Well, Chernyshov got out of his KHL contract early, and scored 55 points in 23 games for the Saginaw Spirit of the OHL after an injury kept him out of the start of the season. He even scored on his first Canadian juniors shift. If you took his production and put its rate to a 65-game pace, the same number of games it took his teammate, Michael Misa, to score 134 points, Chernyshov was on track for 155 or 156 points. He was fifth on his team in scoring, sandwiched between players with 58 and 68 games played on their list. Chernyshov will now spend next season in the AHL with the Barracuda, if he doesn’t outright make the Sharks. He very well might, already at 205 pounds, standing 6’3”.
Having played a very successful season for a defenseman his age in the KHL, even setting a record for points scored by a U18 skater in a season (11 — more than Vladimir Tarasenko in 2009, Evgeni Kuznetsov in 2010, Nikita Kucherov in 2011, Valeri Nichushkin in 2013, Kirill Kaprizov in 2015, and Matvei Michkov in 2022), Anton Silayev did not have to deal with the same skepticism of his play. Especially as a defenseman, standing 6’7”, having that productive KHL experience made him instantly likeable. Considering some people even mocked Silayev in the top five, it is easy to see why the team chose to go in his direction — and I think him or Buium were very acceptable options at 10. With Silayev expected to complement Luke Hughes on the left side for many years, I was on board with the pick. I look forward to those years after Silayev arrives in America.
But, on the note of my favorite non-Devil from the 2024 Draft, perhaps people did not realize that Chernyshov’s four points in the KHL would have made him the most prolific U18 scorer in six of the KHL’s 13 completed seasons at that point. This might be one of those draft slips fans try to throw back in their team’s faces (i.e. in a we drafted Chase Stillman over Logan Stankoven? kind of way) if their first round selections turn out to be non-contributors. Considering Dobber Prospects had him as high as 10th, and both Sportsnet and TSN had him 18th, the Sharks may have been gifted a dangerous duo in him and Celebrini. I can only imagine how much less gloomy fans here would be about our forward pipeline if the Devils had someone like him. Oh well: there’s always this year.
Chernyshov’s case is not as mind-boggling as Jesper Bratt’s (who had 17 points in 48 games in the HockeyAllsvenskan in his draft year, falling to the sixth round), but it is a reminder to be a little more respectful of players who do not go through the CHL, and to a lesser extent, than players who go through the NCAA or USHL. Cultural bias still festers in a lot of prospect evaluation. So if a guy like Bruno Osmanis, with his seven points in 27 Allsvenskan games this year, ends up a third round pick, give the guy a chance and wait to see what his tools are.
Patience is Key
As I said earlier, the range for most of these guys making the NHL and making contributions on the Devils will be between 2028 and 2035. Hopefully, by the end of the decade, they have at least two or three prospects from this year who are roster candidates if not outright contributors already. Players who are selected in this year’s draft will have years to gain muscle and weight. They will have years to work on skating. They will have years to work on details while they play big minutes in developmental or overseas professional leagues. If the team picks someone like Arseni Gritsyuk, who takes years to come over to America, but projects to be very good when they do, I would take it.
That said, these prospects will not be their complete selves in five years, anyway. That should just some of them should be viable NHL players, even if just as a bottom six player or third pairing defenseman. And even if they are still in the AHL at 22, 23, or 24 years old, I went out looking for AHLers in their early-to-mid 20s who I think can still make the NHL not even a few weeks ago. Maybe those kinds of guys are not going to end up in your favorite team’s top six, but there will always be guys like Blake Coleman, Michael Bunting, or Mason Marchment to break the rule.
Eventually, the team will also have to start weighing whether they can afford to keep trading away draft capital and prospects. Losing Herman Traff in the Brian Dumoulin trade was a tough blow to our upper-mid level prospect pool. If the Devils go an swing a big futures trade for an NHLer or two later this week, it might leave them at the point of having a barren pipeline. Considering the Devils have not even reached a Conference Finals with this core yet, that idea worries me. So, if they do make a trade this weekend, losing a couple more picks or prospects, I certainly hope they use their actual selections on players who they think can score a game-winning goal in the Stanley Cup Finals rather than someone whose best hope is being a grinder who can eat regular season minutes. Look for the next star, and let them come into a machine of a contending team in three to five years.
Your Thoughts
What kind of players do you want to see the Devils select this year? How important do you think mid-round drafting is? How many prospects are you willing to see traded before the next season begins? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for reading.