The 2024-25 New Jersey Devils season opens very soon. On October 4, the Devils face the Buffalo Sabres in Prague, Czechia. To get ready for the season, we're doing a daily piece countdown of all the numbers of the Devils sweaters and moments in Devils franchise history. The following few players are a first-round pick who didn’t develop well here with Pavel Zacha, former University of Brown player Nick Lappin, and the goaltender who started the goaltender problems for the Devils in Cory Schneider.
Pavel Zacha
Pavel Zacha was the 6th overall pick in the 2015 NHL Draft selected by the Devils. The Devils needed help in the center position, and Zacha could’ve been a great player. In Zacha’s first three seasons in New Jersey, he averaged 25 points in each of them.
He improved on those numbers with 32 points in 2019-20. When his 2020-21 season began, he had a great start. Starting with 12 points in 15 games had Devils fans thinking he was finally living up to his draft pick, and his season ended up being his second best as a Devil with 35 points.
In his final season as a Devil in the 2021-22 season, he scored 36 points. One problem: it wasn't a COVID-shortened season, so it was a pretty big disappointment.
When the offseason started that year, the Devils traded him away to the Boston Bruins in exchange for Erik Haula. In Boston, Zacha has been a much better player. Thanks to Boston’s system and roster, which are more talented enough to allow him to build as a strong supporting player, in fact, in the two seasons he’s played there, he’s averaged 50 points. Thankfully, it’s worked out for the Devils, and Haula has been a great addition and a solid player. However, things would be different if the Devils drafted Mikko Rantanen or Mathew Barzal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxA3A7f3Fp4
Nick Lappin
Lappin was a 6-1 right-wing who went undrafted in the 2016 NHL Draft. The Devils picked him up after his college career at Brown University. When he went to Albany to play for the AHL team, Lappin had a 29-point season in the 2016-17 season. Lappin was promoted, and in his first year in the NHL, he scored 7 points with four goals and three assists. However, despite positive results in the AHL with Albany and Binghamton, he could not produce the same results when he returned for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons. In the 2019 offseason, he would sign a one-year contract with the St. Louis Blues, and he played for them in the 2019 preseason.
Cory Schneider
Everybody knows about the famous trade in the 2013 NHL Draft, where the Devils acquired Cory Schneider, and that trade still comes up quite often. But let's go deeper into the idea of the trade.
Martin Brodeur was 40 years old when the 2012-13 season ended. It was clear that Brodeur needed help to keep up with the new-aged goaltenders. Knowing that he needed a new plan, Lou Lamoriello executed that trade for Cory Schneider. Lamoriello was hoping that the 26-year-old goaltender would become the next centerpiece for the Devils, which probably laid serious expectations on Cory Schneider’s shoulders.
Unfortunately for Lou, there was one problem. Schneider always played as a backup to Roberto Luongo, so he had no experience as a No. 1 starter. Plus, the Canucks had a balanced system in terms of players. He struggled to find any form when he was thrown into the fire to begin the 2013-14 season with a rebuilding Devils team.
In the seven seasons he played for the Devils, he could only get over .500 twice, in the 2015-16 season, where he went 27-25, and the 2017-18 season, where he went 17-16. Schneider had trouble making saves that any goaltender should’ve made, and he had significant injury problems; in the 2017-18 season, he had a hip injury that forced him to get surgery in the offseason; in the 2019-20 home opener, he left the game with a lower-body injury. When Tom Fitzgerlad took over as GM in October of 2020, Schenider was bought out of his contract as a Devil and played for the Islanders AHL team and one game as an Islander against the Devils on April 3rd, 2022, in which he won 4-3.
Cory Schneider was a gamble by Lou to change the goaltending in New Jersey to keep it up at the top. However, the gamble completely backfired, and now the Devils are hoping that Jacob Markstrom is the answer to end all the goaltending problems the organization has had for years after Schneider seemed to have started them.