New Jersey Devils: Top 25 Prospects At Midseason

Previously Ranked: 13

Marian Studenic is another player that’s seen a steep decline to his play this season. We’re not sure what happened. Studenic was playing on Binghamton’s top line for most of last season, but this year he’s fighting to stay in the lineup. He has six points. That’s in 21 games. This is coming off a season where he had five points in the IIHF World Championships. What happened? We still think he can eventually turn it around, being only 21 years old, but the chance that last season’s breakout (which still was only 28 points) might be the outlier.

Previously Ranked: 12

This one feels a little unfair, but sometimes that’s how hockey works out. Graeme Clarke was working to push himself into our top ten. We admitted in the preseason report that we loved Graeme Clarke, and we overrated him in the preseason rankings based on his insane ceiling. Then, it looked like we were seeing the future. Clarke scored seven goals in his first nine games, but then a shoulder injury that likely knocked him down in the draft came back up, and now he’s out four-to-six months. He may or may not return this season. He could still be an amazing scorer, but this shoulder thing has us spooked.

Previously Ranked: 17

Akira Schmid was the highest ranked goalie in the preseason list. He isn’t the highest ranked Devils prospect anymore. Schmid was traded after a rough six starts with the Omaha Lancers in the USHL. He’s now with the Sioux City Musketeers, and he had a really good first start with them. However, starts are few and far between for him. He got no starts at World Juniors. There were murmurs that he could steal the job from Luca Hollenstein, but he was unable to make it work. He’s a teenager and a goalie, so we expect to see him on this list for a while, but right now we didn’t like what we’ve seen so far. It’s still better than his one start for the Lethbridge Hurricanes.

Previously Ranked: 14

Notre Dame started off the season on fire, going 8-0-1 to start the season. Then, they’ve fallen completely off the map. They are now 10-10-4, and have fallen all the way to 18th in the rankings. Matthew Hellickson is not taking the jump in his junior season that we were hoping we’d see. During his freshman season, we thought he’d be NHL ready by now. It seems like he has a long way to go, which we should probably expect from a 7th-round pick.

Previously Ranked: 20

Gilles Senn is one of the only players on this list to actually get NHL action this season. He had a .902 save percentage, which is actually better than his overall save percentage in Binghamton. That doesn’t tell the whole story. Senn has been playing much better as of late. Still, Senn is gigantic, standing at 6’5. He’s coming off three full seasons at HC Davos, so we’d expect it to take some time to get used to the changes. He has some work to do, and he’s already 23 years old, but there’s at least flashes he could one day be an NHL goalie.