The New Jersey Devils are a team that’s focused on its youth and turning that into a team that can contend some time in the future. The exact timeline of contention is anyone’s guess. This Devils team is basically an entire NHL roster of players under the age of 25. The ascension of players like Jack Hughes, Ty Smith, Michael McLeod, Pavel Zacha, and Nico Hischier is somewhat expected because they are all former 1st-round picks. However, lower-round picks like Jesper Bratt, Yegor Sharangovich, and Miles Wood have really helped the Devils fill out the lineup with skill while keeping the goal of building around Hischier and Hughes.
There have been a lot of prospect graduations since the last time we did this. Our rules are the same for how we grade a prospect. The player has to be 23 years old or younger, and he can’t be a guaranteed NHL player on paper. Obviously, there’s some guesswork here, but we tend to err on the side of “still a prospect”. So, while there’s an outside chance Janne Kuokkanen might start the year in the AHL if the Devils go crazy in free agency, he’s considered a graduated prospect.
The postseason/pre-NHL Draft ranking of the New Jersey Devils prospects.
As far as age goes, it’s age as of this writing, not the age based on the beginning of the season. Not sure if that impacts any of the prospects, but those are the rules.
The Devils goalie pipeline got pretty good this season, and Cole Brady was the biggest surprise among them. While players like Gilles Senn and Evan Cormier have completely lost their expectations, they have been easily replaced but new signees and also this player. Brady was stellar at times for Arizona State. He had some inconsistencies, but he finished the season with a .910 save percentage. He only got three wins on 13 games played, which obviously isn’t great, but it had more to do with the team in front of him. Brady’s premiere performance came against the seventh-ranked Michigan squad. He stopped 41 shots and only let in one goal in an epic tie that became one of the best performances from an underperforming Sun Devils team.