Devils 2017-18 team discussion (player news and notes) - season begins!

[JimEIV]

Lol....
2015 draft was Shero's? Is that a joke?
He was in the job for 60 freaking days.

Yeah a draft takes a few days to prepare for... just like a Yahoo fantasy draft. lol .

 

[Blender]

I meant here. It should go without saying Shero already has built cup teams.

I know. I should have included the sarcasm emoji. I meant if he won a cup the next criticism would be why hasn't he won 3.

Or make the conference finals in his year after the franchise never made the playoffs in their history?

Or make the conference finals 3 times, make the playoffs 7 of his first 8 years and win a cup after the franchise was chased from two cities and never had an above 500 record in their history.

No one is taking away Lou's legacy and importance to this franchise. Lou is the greatest thing that has ever happened to it and he was the Devils for decades. That doesn't mean he's immune to criticism for how things went at the end. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like everything was amazing when the team missed the playoffs in 4 of his last 5 seasons here and he left the team lacking in top end talent with a roster in shambles.

 

[NJDevs26]

The Lou vs. Shero rhetoric is probably the most tiring thing to read. I'd rather us go back and forth about what 4th liners should be playing for 20 pages...

Nobody that follows Lou is ever going to get credit or even the benefit of the doubt with the older segment of the fanbase. Although with the younger segment of the fanbase anyone was gonna be better than Lou so I guess it's close to even out.

Lol....
2015 draft was Shero's? Is that a joke?
He was in the job for 60 freaking days.

Yeah a draft takes a few days to prepare for... just like a Yahoo fantasy draft. lol .

So I guess you'll blame Conte the next time you rip the Blackwood pick.

 

[JimEIV]

The Lou vs. Shero rhetoric is probably the most tiring thing to read. I'd rather us go back and forth about what 4th liners should be playing for 20 pages...

I actually agree. It's a silly argument. But there is a constant attempt to denigrate Lou to elevate Shero and I don't understand it at all.

Lou is this franchise. Everything was created by him. We would be the Nashville Predators if it wasn't for Lou. So I don't understand the need to create this narrative that he left us in ruins and we needed a savior.

It's nonsense. Shero can be appreciated for his contributions without trying to destroy the legacy of the single most important person in the Devils history.

 

[Tretyak 20]

Lol....
2015 draft was Shero's? Is that a joke?
He was in the job for 60 freaking days.

Yeah a draft takes a few days to prepare for... just like a Yahoo fantasy draft. lol .

My feeling is it doesn't matter how long he was in charge, the manager is always responsible for his juniors' failures.

 

[Blender]

Lol....
2015 draft was Shero's? Is that a joke?
He was in the job for 60 freaking days.

Yeah a draft takes a few days to prepare for... just like a Yahoo fantasy draft. lol .

Wait a minute, before you blamed Shero for parts of 2015 you didn't like. MacKenzie Blackwood -G- (42nd Overall 2015)

There is no other person you can look at for those events other than Shero.

 

[JimEIV]

So I guess you'll blame Conte the next time you rip the Blackwood pick.

I did blame Conte. But I blame Shero more.

The pick was two parts if you remember. We traded down first... Conte can't do that.

We turned a #36 overall into #42 and picked a goalie in a deep draft. No matter how Blackwood turns out, that was a bad move.

 

[My3Sons]

The team is clearly still a work in progress right now. I think Shero deserves more time to continue building the team based on what he has done so far.

 

[JimEIV]

The team is clearly still a work in progress right now. I think Shero deserves more time to continue building the team based on what he has done so far.

It would be a much more complete work if the Defense was addressed at all, even a tiny bit. And that is what my orginal point was. The defense has been neglected.

Not sure how this is even debatable but for some reason it turned into Lou sucks so Shero had to neglect the defense. Which is just whacky in my opinion.

 

[JimEIV]

No one is taking away Lou's legacy and importance to this franchise. Lou is the greatest thing that has ever happened to it and he was the Devils for decades. That doesn't mean he's immune to criticism for how things went at the end. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like everything was amazing when the team missed the playoffs in 4 of his last 5 seasons here and he left the team lacking in top end talent with a roster in shambles.

You did it again.

Saying Lou left the franchise in shambles is turning two blind eyes to what actually happened.

Losing Parise and the entire Kovalchuk debacle an owner that was missing paychecks and forcings everyone of its players to flee like rats from sinking ship and completely forgetting or discounting the fact that under these terrible conditions he got them to the Stanley Cup Finals...

Saying Lou left the team in shambles is purely a false narrative and it's being done to elevate the current situation. It's BS and doesn't remotely resemble what actually occurred.

 

[My3Sons]

Nobody that follows Lou is ever going to get credit or even the benefit of the doubt with the older segment of the fanbase. Although with the younger segment of the fanbase anyone was gonna be better than Lou so I guess it's close to even out.



So I guess you'll blame Conte the next time you rip the Blackwood pick.

I’m about as old as the fanbase gets. I am grateful that Lou was the architect behind the rise and heights the team reached. I also recognize that he never really adjusted to the cap era and whether it was the prior owner desperate for a few extra dollars from a couple of playoff games or whatever it was at some point Lou lost his edge and he and Conte struggled at the draft by and large. They started to rally a bit at the end and we are seeing some of that now in Severson and Santini and hopefully Zacha. I give Shero lots of credit for what he has done in a relatively short time. Fix the defense somehow and keep drafting well and the team is right back in it again. I don’t think Lou could have done that.

 

[My3Sons]

It would be a much more complete work if the Defense was addressed at all, even a tiny bit. And that is what my orginal point was. The defense has been neglected.

Not sure how this is even debatable but for some reason it turned into Lou sucks so Shero had to neglect the defense. Which is just whacky in my opinion.

I think the idea is that other than a draft pick or two more that Shero hasn’t had any real chance to fix the defense the way he has the forwards. You of course can disagree but without knowing what choices he had - beyond the iffy trade for Mueller it’s hard to say what might have been. I agree that he doesn’t seem to have a great plan for the defense given the merry go round of stop gap signings but now that he has some expendable assets and some young prospect and player depth maybe he can start work on the backend. The nuance people try to express doesn’t always lend itself to this sort of exchange and the discussion can veer unexpectedly. This is likely one of those times. I saw really crappy teams on the early 80’s and of course the last few seasons. There’s no quick fix and what made Lou’s tenure were great picks in the draft and of course getting Stevens. That all took time and it’s not like the team were cup finalists right away when he took over.

 

[Emperoreddy]

Lou left the team in shambles. We had no top prospects. We were the oldest and slowest team in the league by a country mile.

We were dead in the water.

 

[Emperoreddy]

This is so f***ing stupid. The team has been playing some good hockey. Winning games, and scoring goals, and we are stuck arguing about the past.

 

[Bleedred]

Lou left the team in shambles. We had no top prospects. We were the oldest and slowest team in the league by a country mile.

We were dead in the water.

Yup.

Love Lou, but it was time to part ways. It happens to the best of them. It was just time for a change. It certainly doesn't taint his legacy or anything, but he wasn't getting it done here anymore. It was almost 30 years.

 

[Oneiro]

Most of the significant pieces that Lou left on the team continue to develop. The big pieces Shero brought in are basically known commodities - Hall, Palmieri, Johansson. And then of course, we'll have to see the fruits of what Castron has done.

People value certainty and short-term gratification over things in flux. It's a lot easier to appreciate Shero's impact on this team vs. Lou's. Every single young lunch pail guy on that Penguins Cup team is a Shero-era pick (Guetzel, Kuhnackl, Murray, Rust) but good luck getting Pens fans to give Shero any credit.

You need special players to win the cup, let alone get there. It's hard to do that without having top picks. It's harder to do that when you routinely miss in the later rounds. Or when your first rounders bust (Corrente, Tedenby, Josefson).

Lou didn't leave us in shambles (Schneider, Zacha, Severson, Santini, Speers, Coleman - perhaps it's not enough but that is not shambles, sorry), and, like Shero, he tried a bunch of dumpster-diving things that didn't work but also didn't hurt long-term, save for Clowe's deal.

But those draft failures are glaring. I don't care if you draft later in the first round for a better part of a decade - when you don't hit on anything of consequence for that long, that's a piss poor excuse. And his small UFA bets were just as bad.

 

[MadDevil]

Jim, please make up your mind whether you're going to be impatient or patient, because your constant waffling is getting old. You sit here and talk about how a guy like Andy Greene took until he was 25-26 to make an impact, then turn around and label Mueller a bust after 50 some games. You're willing to sing the praises of guys Lou drafted years ago, yet turn around and say "what has Shero done" when he's had 2 drafts that were completely his.

 

[R8Devs]

when ray came in there wasn't that many teams in a worse position than the Devils were. at the end of the 2014-2015 season how many teams would have traded their position for the devils? Guys like guentzel have produced better than any lou draft pick of recent so i don't get that comparison. the fact that you even had to mention 2015 late round picks and a 4th line center like coleman shows that the devils were in a terrible spot.

 

[MadDevil]

It doesn't even matter how much of it was actually Lou's fault. Part of it was years of drafting late or trading picks because we were an annual playoff team. And some of it was just plain bad luck, which is always a possibility with any draft pick

The fact of the matter is our impact forwards we drafted for the better part of a decade were Zajac and Henrique. If you can't see that was a pretty significant factor is us needing to trade Larsson and multiple draft picks to bring in Hall, Palmieri, Johansson, and to focus on drafting forwards, then I don't know what to say.

 

[NJDevs26]

The team was in shambles after 2015, whatever or whoever you want to blame for it I don't see how you could watch the oldest, slowest team in the league with NJD Bench coaching the last half of the season, losing all those games down the stretch including getting blown out by the Rangers in the home finale being booed off the ice and say anything different. Especially when the great prospect hopes were Quenneville, Santini, and a lot of back-end/AHL players after that.

It's not ruining his legacy to suggest Lou didn't do as good a job post-lockout as he did pre-lockout at drafting or FA signings or that it was time for a course correction. Almost every legend (GM or coach) that's around as long as Lou has declining results by the end, and eventually every sustained period of success ends in a cap system and there needs to be a reboot no matter who you are. Lou was the last to realize that era of winning every year was over and there needed to be a reboot. Even after 9 and 17 left and Patty got old, Lou still kept trying to patch, patch, patch.

Lou was basically infallible for two decades, and Lou did make a lot of astute minor deals and signings in 2012 which can't really be forgotten, but on the whole a lot of our team success post-lockout was still because of guys drafted or acquired pre-lockout (Marty, Elias, Parise, Zajac, Langenbrunner, Rafalski, Madden) and the magic touch Lou had in 2012 with guys like Zidlicky, Carter, etc, just wasn't there in other years when we were trading third rounders for Tuomo Ruutu and signing guys like Volchenkov, Vishnevsky, Ryder, the yearly goon du jour, etc - guys too old and/or who didn't fit into the changing game.

This is so ****ing stupid. The team has been playing some good hockey. Winning games, and scoring goals, and we are stuck arguing about the past.

Unfortunately that's going to be the way it is until this new era team has some real success and as long as certain people get overly defensive over every little criticism of Lou and turn it into Armageddon.

 

[Bleedred]

I feel like with the way Lou was doing things in the last several years of his tenure, we would have traded Larsson for some 28-32 year old forward, instead of (then) 24, almost 25 year old Taylor Hall. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been for a really good player. Just one that was a bit older than Hall was.

I feel like we might have also used the Mojo, Mueller, Palmieri picks on slightly older comparable versions of those players. It seemed like Lou always preferred having an older team, even though our 95 cup team was very young. An older team isn’t automatically a bad thing. Just not the direction we needed to continue in.

 

[MadDevil]

I think Lou just wanted to stay competitive, which is admirable in some ways, but not where the team probably should have gone after Parise and the Russian bolted. He did leave us some nice pieces, but not enough for there to be a quick turnaround.

Anyway, what's done is done. I'd rather talk about the team moving forward than rehashing the same tired argument again and again (I swear some people do it just to pick a fight). Hopefully we make some moves this summer to bring in some defensive help. The thought of this team's speed with a competent to good defense corps is tantalizing.

 

[Tundra]

The devils top 'prospect' was Reid Boucher a few years back. Yes, Lou left the team in shambles because his ego was too big to let go and fold his cards. This stubbornness happens to many great executives who have experienced the highest of highs.

 

[Tundra]

Secondly, and more importantly, who misses a declining Parise and that albatross contract? I said from the beginning he wasn't worth those figures, given his gritty playstyle over the length of a longterm contract.

 

[Zippy316]

I did blame Conte. But I blame Shero more.

The pick was two parts if you remember. We traded down first... Conte can't do that.

We turned a #36 overall into #42 and picked a goalie in a deep draft. No matter how Blackwood turns out, that was a bad move.

This is very likely incorrect. Devils supposedly were eyeing Aho with that pick who went to Carolina one pick before. After Aho went, Devils took forever (and called a timeout) to make their decision. Obviously, Conte has a say in whether they should keep the pick or trade it; he supposedly would've "fallen out of his chair" according to Shero if Devils didn't take Zacha.

If we're going to go the revisionist route and critique the decision now, the biggest miss from going back to 42 looks to be Carlo, but I question whether the Devils would've picked him given the defense we had at the time. Paul Bittner has gone nowhere. A.J Greer's numbers look very underwhelming. While guys like Nic Meloche and Gabriel Gagne look very close to busts. Ryan Gropp looks like a good prospect, but nothing to lose sleep over.

All things considered, your gripe with the decision was understandable, but it's not like the Devils missed out on much.