The New Jersey Devils against their former goalies is a tale as old as time at this point, but it never ceases to pop back up at the most inopportune moments.
On Friday night, 2023 playoff hero and former Devils goalie Akira Schmid started for the Vegas Golden Knights in place of the injured Carter Hart, dropping a casual 24-save shutout and handing the Devils their second consecutive blank on home ice.
Jacob Markstrom, on the other end, allowed three goals on 25 shots, marking his third straight game with a save percentage below .900. And, for the record, Markstrom has a save percentage below .900 in 11 of his 14 appearances for the Devils this season. That's not good for a 35-year-old who just received a two-year, $12 million contract extension on top of costing the Devils a first-round pick and Kevin Bahl for his services.
This is not to paint Schmid as a Vezina contender or a savant, but he does have a .911 save percentage in 21 career games with the Golden Knights. He's also not the first to succeed after leaving New Jersey; looking at you, Scott Wedgewood and Mackenzie Blackwood.
In fact, a declining role left open the possibility of what became the inevitable, and the Swiss netminder and his agent got their wish when Schmid was finally traded.
It just proves what we already know: the New Jersey Devils have no clue how to evaluate goaltenders and manage their assets accordingly.
Schmid and Alexander Holtz, a former seventh overall pick, were traded to the Golden Knights in the 2024 offseason for Paul Cotter and a third-round pick.
Cotter, a fourth-line forward, doesn't kill penalties for the Devils and has just 28 points in 207 games with the Devils. He's much more physical than Holtz, yes, but Holtz scored 16 goals and 28 points in his last season with the Devils while primarily featuring on the fourth line himself.
For the sake of comparison, Dawson Mercer had only 33 points in 2023-24 despite playing much higher in the lineup on a more consistent basis.
Schmid, Wedgewood, and Blackwood are now a combined 8-0-0 in their careers against the Devils, while New Jersey is stuck floundering with two rapidly aging goalies showing clear signs of decline. Markstrom has shown worse than Jake Allen, to be clear, but neither player is going to be particularly reliable for the Devils at this stage of their respective careers.
If only the Devils had more median-aged goalies like Schmid, 25, or Nico Daws, 24, to at least give them consistently average, and sometimes above-average, goaltending until the future, such as Mikhail Yegorov, arrives.