The New Jersey Devils had multiple great rookies on the rosters this season, but with the team dealing with a tire fire of a season and COVID really knocking most of the players out for the better part of two months, most of those rookies fell off the Calder Trophy voting list. Some of them made a run towards the end of the season, but on Tuesday we learned it wasn’t nearly enough. Ty Smith and Yegor Sharangovich both finished in the top 10 in Calder voting, but they finished 7th and 10th.
Ty Smith is a little surprising he didn’t do better. Kirill Kaprizov is an obvious winner of the Calder, and we already knew that Jason Robertson and Alex Nedeljkovic were in the top three. 7th honestly isn’t bad for how bad parts of Smith’s season went. When he was paired with Damon Severson at his peak, he was legitimately a candidate to win the award even with Kaprizov’s ridiculous start.
He ended up falling behind names like Igor Shesterkin and Josh Norris. Smith did finish ahead of Vancouver Canucks defenseman Nils Hoglander, who himself had a really good season. Sharangovich finished 10th, but he still finished ahead of players like Ilya Sorokin, K’Andre Miller, and Kaapo Kahkonen.
Smith took home one third-place vote while raking in three fourth-place votes and 11 fifth-place votes. Out of 100 voters, 15 thought Smith was one of the top five rookies in the league.
Sharangovich’s voting was very strange. He made it to the top ten basically on the back of one voter. Four players got second-place votes this year. Kaprizov got one of them (he also got 99 first-place votes). Robertson took 94 of them. Nedeljkovic got four more. That last and final second-place vote went to Sharangovich. Outside of that second-place vote, Sharangovich got one fourth-place vote and seven fifth-place votes. One voter really liked what he saw from Jack Hughes‘ winger.
To be honest, this was a really deep class of rookies. Tim Stützle was the only big-time rookie from the 2020 NHL Draft to get any love in the voting.
Smith had a great season and made it clear the Devils have an awesome defenseman for years to come. Sharangovich was a legitimate scorer after lighting up the KHL. The Devils have two budding stars on their hands, and it’s clear despite the team’s struggles this season, others saw that too.