In an up and down NHL Draft featuring many picks that were all over the board, the New Jersey Devils made two very different choices.
The first of which was a kid that almost all Devils fans wanted and fits this team like a glove in Luke Hughes. He has all the tools to be not just good but a legitimate top-two defender on this team. Now the Devils have some legitimate prospects and enough of them that it would be astounding if they did not have a solid core in a year or two. Jack’s reaction to his brother being drafted was a thing of beauty to watch as well and it was just such a natural emotional reaction that it was heartwarming to see. This is something he will clearly never forget and will put deep roots for both players in New Jersey where hopefully they will be staying long term.
On the other side of things, the Devils once again took a huge leap with their last first-round pick and selected Chase Stillman of the Sudbury Wolves, though he played this season in Denmark with the OHL closed down. This was a player who was not even on my radar for the first round and honestly one that I had personally never even looked at. From what one can read on him this is a stretch of a pick and he was projected between the second and third rounds. That in itself is telling and what the team was thinking on this is a little baffling with some good players on the board still such as Aatu Raty.
This last season in Denmark he put up 9 goals and 16 points in 8 games along with a whopping 43 penalty minutes but it is hard to really judge if this is good or not. Yes, playing against men as a draft-eligible player is hard but the numbers are nowhere near comparable to Sweden, Russia, or even the Swiss league. With his numbers the season before in junior they show nothing really telling in a good or bad way as well. 13 goals 34 points in 58 games is not bad for a younger guy but without seeing how it was built on not a lot can be made of this but he was certainly a penalty machine with 63 minutes.
This pick may end up looking good in a few years but right now it feels like too much of a reach and someone they could have potentially grabbed in the third round or traded back quite a ways to get if they were high on him while picking up some later picks. Overall however it is a good day and getting another Hughes is amazing but the less-obvious picks are the ones GMs really have to nail. Taking Stillman a year after a huge reach on Mukhammadullan is very worrying.