Pavel Zacha Vital to New Jersey Devils Success This Season

The 2019-20 New Jersey Devils should find success this season with the abundance of talent that they have assembled. The most polarizing member of the team will also be vital to this team’s success.

Pavel Zacha has been labeled a bust by many New Jersey Devils fans. He was the sixth-overall pick in the 2015 draft. He was drafted ahead of stud defensemen Zach Werenski and Ivan Provorov, and offensive stars in the making by the likes of Timo Meier, Mikko Rantanen, Mathew Barzal and Kyle Conner. Hindsight is 20/20 and playing the what-if game will often prevent you from taking a forward-thinking approach about the player.

If you look at it from a numbers perspective, his statistics leave a lot to be desired. He’s yet to score 20 goals or hit more than 30 points in a season. That’s not to say he doesn’t bring anything offensively to the table. Zacha has good offensive instincts and a sneaky good shot.

In spite of his offensive inconsistencies, one aspect of his game that can not be questioned are the defensive responsibilities he brings to the team. In an era where teams like to play fast and score, defense and penalty kill are still an important aspect of hockey.

One of the very few bright spots during the team’s disaster 2018-19 campaign was their ability to kill penalties. The Devils found themselves short-handed often last season amassing 745 minutes worth of penalties, yet they finished with the leagues fourth best penalty kill rate at 84.3%. When the team was short-handed you’d often see #37 out there, and as the penalty kill success indicates he had something to do with it.

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Let’s not forget that he is still a young, raw hockey player at 22 years old. How many 22 year olds in all walks of life are truly great at what they do at that age? There is still plenty of growth to his game.

He may lack offensive upside, but with the way the Devils are now constructed he doesn’t need to be a 30-goal scorer or a top-six forward. He is a viable defensive center with the ability to be a mainstay on the penalty kill and possibly chip in 15-20 goals a year.

Zacha could also play left wing, so there’s potential that he could be utilized in many different ways if need be. If the team is as good as many people suggest, he will be playing late in games to protect leads. He could even play on Jack Hughes‘s wing as Hughes gets acclimated to the NHL game, particularly early in the season. They could potentially compliment each other well as Zacha brings a defensive component to a Hughes led line and Zacha’s lethal shot could benefit Hughes’s play making ability.

On a team that lacks size, he brings that to the lineup as well. Thinking long term as Travis Zajac has two years left on his contract, he could ultimately be replaced by Zacha as the team’s third-line center. In the event of an untimely injury which we all know will happen, Zacha could adequately move up the lineup because of his versatility.

We are going to see a motivated Zacha. The team has drafted three centers in the 1st round since Zacha was drafted, two of whom are locks to be the teams one-two center tandem for the foreseeable future. As his career has been called into question, he needs to use that as fuel to become a more complete hockey player. The contract negotiations with general manager Ray Shero seemingly didn’t go the way he thought it would, so his play directly correlates to what his next contract will merit. If that isn’t motivating enough, then we don’t know what is.

The Devils should be a very competitive team this upcoming season. While all or most of the praise and accolades will likely go to Taylor Hall, Kyle Palmieri, Nico Hischier, Jack Hughes and P.K. Subban, the true underdog is Pavel Zacha. He has showed glimpses of what he could do, but if he’s able to put it together that could be the difference of the Devils being a good team to a very good, or shall I even say great team. The disdain for Zacha amongst Devils fans has gone too far. Let’s be objective as to how we view Zacha going forward on this team as it is constructed, not from the scope of what we perceived him to be as a sixth-overall pick.