Leave It To The Devils To Give A Crash Course On How To Crush A Young Goalie’s Confidence
The Devils’ development plan for Nico Daws’ 2021-22 campaign was that he would share the net with fellow goalie Akira Schmid at AHL Utica.
This is Daws’ first professional season in North America after New Jersey selected him in the third round (84th overall) in the 2020 NHL Draft. Thanks to COVID-19, he was limited to 10 games last season, all in a league in his native Germany.
Daws was doing fine in Utica, where he was buffered by a strong supporting cast that raced out to a 13-0-0 start. In 18 games for the Comets, he went 12-3-2 with a 2.41 goals against average and a .918 save percentage. The most consecutive starts in a row he was tasked with in any stretch was four, only once on a back-to-back.
So of course, in typical Devils’ fashion, that body of work qualified Daws to man the cage for New Jersey’s last nine games, including back-to-back 6-3 shellackings this week in Vancouver and Calgary that got him pulled before the halfway mark.
What are the Devils thinking? I get that injuries have taken out starter Mackenzie Blackwood (heel) and backup Jonathan Bernier (hip), but If Jon Gillies can’t be trusted to start an odd game to give the 21-year old kid a break (and his body of work suggests he probably can’t be), then what is he doing on the team?
Devils Head Coach Lindy Ruff acknowledged the callousness of going back to Daws on Wednesday at first-place Calgary after an off night on Tuesday where, in Ruff’s words, “a few pucks went through him on a couple of the (Vancouver) goals.”
Sure enough, I counted three of Calgary’s four goals against Daws in 29:31 as stoppable. After his plan went awry, Ruff said, “I put Nico through a pretty tough test. Probably an unfair test for a young goaltender….We’ve asked a lot of him, probably unfairly.”
Again, why? It’s not like the Devils are one 10-game winning streak away from rejoining the playoff race—they’re 22-34-5, 27 points out of the final wild card slot in the league of the three-point game.
While the Devils have no desire to go into full-blown tank mode over its final 21 games, since at some point you want this core to correlate certain habits with winning games, player development has to trump whatever gives the team its best chance to come out on top in any particular contest. You don’t run your young goaltender into the ground.
In his small sample size in New Jersey, Daws has had a few stellar starts, but overall he hasn’t been a showstopper. The pre-Draft scouting report on him noted how he uses his size (6-foot 4, 203 pounds) to do most of the work, as he isn’t Martin Brodeur on skates (I know, no one is). He needs to work on his mobility and at this level, everything from reading plays to getting into proper positions is done at a speed far greater than anything he has ever experienced.
Daws’ numbers on the season--his save percentage, goals saved above average, high-danger chance save percentage—are all middle-of-the-road, indicative that he has a ways to go before establishing himself as NHL caliber.
Which is acceptable for this stage of his development, so there was no need to put him in a situation where afterwards he feels like he has to go back to the drawing board.
Devils General Manager Tom Fitzgerald has mentioned in interviews that he’s been on the lookout for another goalie in the marketplace, but the bottom line is that to date, he has failed. He had Scott Wedgewood, who had been the third goalie on-and-off for several Devils iterations since 2015, but then lost him to a waiver claim by Arizona. Wedgewood, by the way, has held his own amidst the turbulence in the desert, posting a 10-11-2 record with a .910 save percentage this season.
Contrast that with Gillies, for whom Fitzgerald traded “future considerations” to St. Louis in mid-December. Fitzgerald then watched Gillies go 3-9-1 with a putrid .885 save percentage in 13 starts.
Unlike Bernier, who underwent surgery, Blackwood hasn’t been ruled out for the season, but I’d be shocked if we see him between the pipes before Monday’s trade deadline. Though that puts more urgency under Fitzgerald to rectify this untenable situation, it’s not like he’s out there looking for the next Brodeur. They can buy low on Columbus’ pending free agent Joonas Korpisalo, for all I care.
For what they have now, with Daws struggling and Gillies virtually unplayable, is the figurative embodiment of an empty net.