With the draft under three weeks away its time to look at some potential targets in the 1st round for the New Jersey Devils. The potential of a pre-draft trade still remains and the possibility of trading back seems likely. However, we’ll talk about targets around 17 and targets if the Devils do trade back.
Before we get into this, let’s talk about why I chose to highlight these three players by looking at a tweet from Kevin Papetti whose draft rankings can be found here.
I went all the way back to the 2007 draft to look at the players who were drafted in the second half of the first round (16-30).
— Kevin Papetti (@KPapetti) May 2, 2018
The group on the left did not get drafted from the CHL. The group of the right did (I left out Canadian Jr. A players) pic.twitter.com/diLIILyPAD
This is just a brief breakdown of my interpretation of this tweet and how I’ve applied this logic to my preferred draft picks. When you compare prospects tiers 2-4 are relatively similar regardless of where they played prior to the draft. However, you have a far greater chance of adding a Tier 1 player if you draft outside of the CHL in the 2nd half of the 1st round.
So, with that out of the way let’s take a look at some really interesting forward prospects the Devils can target in the 2nd half of the 1st round in attempt to hit a home run.