New Jersey Devils: 5 Possibilities With 6th-Overall Pick In NHL Draft

Alexander Holtz (Photo by ERIK SIMANDER/TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP via Getty Images)
Alexander Holtz (Photo by ERIK SIMANDER/TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP via Getty Images)
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(Photo by Chris Tanouye/Getty Images)
(Photo by Chris Tanouye/Getty Images)

Marco Rossi

The Hockey Writers’ Josh Bell calls this prospect quite possibly the best Austrian prospect ever. He’s also probably very familiar to the Devils scouting staff since he plays on the Ottawa 67’s. He joins Kevin Bahl, Graeme Clarke, Nikita Okhotyuk and Mitchell Hoelscher are all Devils prospects already on the team. Might as well add one more, right?

Marco Rossi would immediately become the best of that bunch, and it’s not particularly close. He was second among all rookies in the OHL last season with 65 points. This season, he went full psycho. He has 120 points in 56 games. Yeah, again, he literally has two points per game. He has an insane 81 assists.

His issue? Well, size again. He’s 5’9, 179 lbs. We’ve seen many, many mock drafts, and where Rossi is going is all over the map. Some places have him going third, while this one NHL.com reporter had him going outside the top ten. That has everything to do with how the evaluator takes size and skill into account. He is one of the most skilled players in the draft.

Rossi is also universally called one of the hardest working players on the ice. Those are the types of the players the Devils target. They want high-quality players that don’t quit in the defensive end of the ice. Rossi very easily makes up for his lack of size with a stupendous effort. After losing Blake Coleman in a trade with the Tampa Bay Lightning, they could use some extra effort.