well yes it could always be worse but that list is pretty awful lol.
Zacha had a nice year finally but still not the player we hoped for at 6OA
Blackwood will be a very good goalie, that was probably out best pick aside from Jack/Nico
Coleman was another very good pick who has become one of the best PK’ers in the league
Wood is solid, skates like the wind and has a scoring touch but is ultimately a 3rd/4th line player
Kerfoot is another decent player but again he’s a 4th liner
The rest of that list is terrible and is a prime example of why our team continually is in the basement, of all those players the only difference maker is Blackwood and arguably Coleman given his prowess on the PK(and he’s not even on the team anymore)
I wasn't going to post this but I wrote it, so whatever.
You're underrating several of these players. Kerfoot is not a 4th liner. Coleman is much more than a PKer.
If you go back and look at most team's lists from 5 years ago, they will look similar to this one. Some teams will be significantly better, others will be slightly worse, and I bet there's 2 or 3 that look significantly worse - where there are almost no NHL players at all on the list. I'd bet the Devils' list is around 18th-22nd best in that time.
The problem is that the Devils' roster at the time had almost no young players on it. Larsson, Henrique, Merrill, and Severson is about it who were non-prospects and off this list.
The Devils did okay in the final years of Conte being here - 2014 is a huge whiff but that was also a very weak draft year. Let's call the scouting staff's work from 2010-2015 a mild failure - they got some decent late round finds but really bungled the top picks in that several players better than Larsson and Zacha were drafted right after them. The problem was that the Devils were picking low and seldom when they desperately needed to be picking high and often - between 2010 and 2015, the Devils picked twice above 29th overall.
