Holtz Has Skills To Help Devils Now If His Play Away From Puck Improves In Preseason

Draft picking in all professional sports is a crapshoot, but when you’re a team that operates under the Harris/Blitzer “Trust the Process” model like the Devils, hitting on picks, especially the first-rounders, is essential to building a competitive organization.

New Jersey, who was god-awful in that department at the end of the legendary Lou Lamoriello era, pivoted direction when Ray Shero took over as General Manager in 2015. Shero did a fine job in accumulating draft capital and no one will argue with his selections of centers Nico Hischier (2018) and Jack Hughes (2019) when the Devils won those respective Draft lotteries. Plucking unheralded Swedish wing Jesper Bratt in the sixth round of the 2016 Draft was pure genius (and/or luck) and the Yegor Sharangovich (2018 fifth round) pick isn’t looking too shabby either.

Unfortunately, Shero’s “hit rate” took a dive when you accounted for his other first-round choices. Pavel Zacha (2015) and Ty Smith (2018) were righteously dumped in trades this offseason while center Michael McLeod, the No. 12 overall pick in the 2016 Draft, still has a job for now, but the team needs to see better production out of him (15 goals and 20 assists in 129 games over the last two seasons) to warrant offering him a contract extension after this season.

Tom Fitzgerald, Shero’s right-hand man dating back to their days together in Pittsburgh, replaced him in time for the 2020 Draft, where he used his three first-round picks on sniping wing Alexander Holtz (No. 7 overall), center Dawson Mercer (No. 18), and towering defenseman Shakir Mukhamadullin (No. 20). Mercer looked like a player from the moment he stepped onto the ice at the Devils Development Camp and finished 11th in the Calder Trophy voting for rookie of the year. Mukhamadullin was a reach when picked, but who knows what he will develop into in the Russian KHL.

The big bet, though, is on Holtz, who scored the game-tying and overtime winning goals in New Jersey’s 4-3 victory over Montreal on Friday night in the first of their three-game swing in the Prospects Challenge tournament held in Buffalo. Holtz was rather quiet in the back-to-back 7-4 loss to the host Sabres on Saturday and did not dress for 3-2 shootout loss to Boston on Monday morning.

Holtz was deemed a natural fit for this relatively low-scoring team (19th in the league last season with 2.99 goals per game), projected as a player who could ride shotgun to either Hughes or Hischier by finishing their marvelous playmaking sequences with his deadly wrist shot.

Holtz is coming off a solid season in AHL Utica, where he potted 26 goals and added 25 assists in 52 games. Since I have no doubt that he can maintain such a pace should the Devils opt to have him start this season in the minors, the best scenario for the organization would be if he proved to be NHL-ready during training camp, which opens on Wednesday.

Fitzgerald gave Holtz a taste of what big-league action requires last season, and it’s fair, though not at all disconcerting since he was still a teenager, to say that it was a bit overwhelming. Though Holtz registered two assists in nine games, it was obvious he needed time to acclimate himself to the faster and more physical pace.

During Friday’s contest, Devils streaming analyst Glenn “Chico” Resch noted that Holtz might be able to get away with weaknesses in his two-way game—if he can score a bunch of goals. Though it came in a meaningless preseason prospects tournament (with Montreal scratching their No.1 overall pick from the 2022 Draft Juraj Slafkovsky), you could tell that Holtz had a different level of confidence playing with speed with the puck on his stick, but you also cringed at certain soft plays that would get him in trouble with coaches should they occur in contests of greater importance.

While with the Islanders, Resch played with possibly the game’s greatest pure goal scorer in Mike Bossy, who, despite periodic imploring from coach Al Arbour, was often disparaged for his work in the defensive zone. Arbour once told Resch, “What Boss can do, nobody else can do.”

So sure, if Holtz jumps into the Devils lineup and starts filling up the nets, then of course the team will adapt to his limitations. But that’s ridiculously unrealistic.

Instead, Holtz has to show the Devils brass that he’s better at the details of the game—blocking shots, tracking defensemen cutting in from the point, coming out of scrums with pucks, etc.—so that he can be trusted in a bottom-six NHL role where he’d most likely be initially slotted.

That process starts this week, with the Devils opening their preseason slate on Monday in Montreal. Again, if Holtz isn’t up to the task, it’s not the end of the world—he is, after all, only 20. But it’s not great either.

The Devils, who have missed the playoffs every season but one since 2012, have driven their fan base to apathy with their pleas for patience. No one argued with Shero’s blueprint for a new era that called for an infusion of talented youth through drafting. He just whiffed on too many high picks.

Unless this next wave of Devils’ picks—mainly Holtz, Luke Hughes, and Simon Nemec, all of whom were selected by Fitzgerald—can justify their high Draft status, this team’s neverending rebuild will continue its circular pattern.