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NJ Devils 2018-19 Development Camp Starts July 10th


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2 minutes ago, mfitz804 said:

You mean the 29th overall in 2012 (Matteau). That was the one to give up, and we wouldn’t have moved from 14 to 30 in 2014 and drafted someone other than Q.

Right i thought there was 31 teams then. And i thought we had the 11th pick. Well the sense of what i said remains the same and you got it lol 14.... Larkin was RIGHT there... LARKIN !!!!

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Re Quenneville being out of shape last season, am I the only one who sees it as positive?  He’s put up very respectable numbers for a 20-21 year old, and he did that while out of shape supposedly.  There might be some there there.

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1 hour ago, Daniel said:

Re Quenneville being out of shape last season, am I the only one who sees it as positive?  He’s put up very respectable numbers for a 20-21 year old, and he did that while out of shape supposedly.  There might be some there there.

Maybe, but just not in his head or heart.  Honestly, I think the kid has the talent to make it, but it doesn't seem like he's desperate enough to get there.  Making the NHL is almost impossible, and unless you have otherworldly talent (which JQ doesn't have), making it without hard work and dedication will never happen.

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12 hours ago, Chuck the Duck said:

Maybe, but just not in his head or heart.  Honestly, I think the kid has the talent to make it, but it doesn't seem like he's desperate enough to get there.  Making the NHL is almost impossible, and unless you have otherworldly talent (which JQ doesn't have), making it without hard work and dedication will never happen.

I remember Taylor Hall didn't have the best off season habits. There was an article last summer about him and Shero having a sit-down and Shero explaining the kind of level he needed to train at to be successful and hit that next level. The result was what we saw last season.

Obviously JQ doesn't have that level or anything near it in him, but there is the possibility he could be taught to self-motivate. This would be a very important season for him to take a step in that direction. 

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20 hours ago, SterioDesign said:

Right i thought there was 31 teams then. And i thought we had the 11th pick. Well the sense of what i said remains the same and you got it lol 14.... Larkin was RIGHT there... LARKIN !!!!

Wouldn't have mattered, Conte still managed to botch the 6th pick a few years ago as many recall. We could have had Barzal, Provorov... 

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5 minutes ago, Kinkyisth3b3st said:

Zacha was widely considered a solid and safe pick by everyone involved, and Conte would have been hung in the streets if the worst offense in franchise history drafted a defenseman. 

Plenty of teams pass on great players every single draft. Give it up.

It's easy to decide who should have been picked years after the draft. I'll never understand the 20/20 hindsight that people use. 

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16 minutes ago, Kinkyisth3b3st said:

Zacha was widely considered a solid and safe pick by everyone involved, and Conte would have been hung in the streets if the worst offense in franchise history drafted a defenseman. 

Plenty of teams pass on great players every single draft. Give it up.

At the time, NJ had Larsson, Severson, Merrill, and Gelinas as the set-in-stone top 4 for the future. Two of the four didn't pan out; one was traded away and didn't hit his potential; Severson is a top four dman, but not without his warts. Andy Greene is still playing on the top four, and there's a chance Mirco Muelller will, too.

At the time, NJ had jack **** for forwards. Now, we have Hall, Hischier, Palmieri, Johansson, Coleman, and Bratt. Along with Zajac and Zacha.

My point---always go BPA. Provorov should've been the pick. However, Barzal was my choice at the time(as I shared with your sentiment at the time). There were enough red flags at the time about Zacha: sub-ppg, questionable hockey IQ, too many penalties/suspensions. Zacha is/was a useful player at 20 year old, and will get better. But there were a lot of people pretty pissed off at the time.

 

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44 minutes ago, Kinkyisth3b3st said:

Zacha was widely considered a solid and safe pick by everyone involved, and Conte would have been hung in the streets if the worst offense in franchise history drafted a defenseman. 

Plenty of teams pass on great players every single draft. Give it up.

At some point, if your scouts are worth anything they need to get the picks right, and  “everyone else thought he was good” doesn’t cut it.  Conte’s track record since 2003 was an unmitigated disaster.  Two things saved the franchise from being set back by the Zacha pick for an additional four years; trading for Taylor Hall and winning the draft lottery.  

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2 minutes ago, Daniel said:

At some point, if your scouts are worth anything they need to get the picks right, and  “everyone else thought he was good” doesn’t cut it.  Conte’s track record since 2003 was an unmitigated disaster.  Two things saved the franchise from being set back by the Zacha pick for an additional four years; trading for Taylor Hall and winning the draft lottery.  

Without the two of them we’d have finished dead last rather than making the playoffs. Believe that. 

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3 minutes ago, Kinkyisth3b3st said:

Conte absolutely is owed a lion’s share of the blame for his draft, but I think it’s also disingenuous to pretend like the Devils did this to themselves. 

The Devils went to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2012. In the two years that followed; their home-grown captain took less money elsewhere; their superstar bolted a year into his 15-year contract; their fan-favorite 2nd line winger got a ridiculously stupid contract from Toronto; their two franchise cup-winning cornerstones (Elias and Brodeur) finally showed serious signs of aging. 

I think people are too quick to sh!t on Lou/Conte for a ton of things that really weren’t in their control. 

Regarding Zacha; it was widely accepted as a solid pick from a ton of people who get paid a lot of money to tell me whether or not I should like the pick as a Devils fan. But I’m an architect, I draw fancy houses for a living and probably know about 1% as much as these scouts know. Sometimes sh!t like that happens, but judging the draft with the benefit of hindsight always seems silly to me. 

A good scouting group finds good players at a frequent enough rate and can see trends in the types of players that will be successful NHLers.  If you’re going to fall back on “widely accepted solid picks” you might as well save money and fire your amateur scouting department and just spend twenty bucks on the black book of scouting, or whatever it’s called, and make your picks based on that.  Sometimes, your director of scouting needs a crystal ball.

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I don't know why we're still talking about Conte, but the Devils were always going to fall into a rebuild at some point.  No one has avoided it yet.  For years people talked about Detroit but Detroit has missed the playoffs two years in a row and has a nightmarish cap situation ahead of them.  When you're trading draft picks every year and you hit a lull in drafting, it's just inevitable that you're going to start a vicious cycle - your draft picks are low and become less likely to succeed - when you hit a rough patch in drafting, your drafted failures retain no value which means you can't trade them for anything, but you still want the NHL team to be good so you start trading picks for NHL players, and meanwhile your NHL team isn't generating value for any of your young players because it's starting to fail, so you can't use them to sell high, so you're forced to sign free agents, who don't retain any value, etc.  We watched that cycle start in about 2002 and it's only in 2016 that it really started to reverse itself.   

Conte likely had a poor process but I don't see anyone crushing the draft reliably.  He's throwing the same darts as anyone else - he just had a much harder task once UFA pick compensation went away.  Meanwhile in 2011-2013 he's gotten some late-round picks make the NHL, and Seney might follow.  A flawed process can still lead to good results.

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In hindsight, could you imagine ANY team fulfilling THAT contract. Parise is already in decline at 33 years old, and he's signed til he's 40 !  I like everyone else wanted him to stay, but, be careful what you wish for.  7.5 mil next 6 years.

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1 hour ago, vadvlfan said:

In hindsight, could you imagine ANY team fulfilling THAT contract. Parise is already in decline at 33 years old, and he's signed til he's 40 !  I like everyone else wanted him to stay, but, be careful what you wish for.  7.5 mil next 6 years.

Parise seemed to have something of resurgence at the end of last season when he came back from back surgery.  So he may have more left in the tank than people think.

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3 hours ago, Daniel said:

Parise seemed to have something of resurgence at the end of last season when he came back from back surgery.  So he may have more left in the tank than people think.

He might have some but most of the rest of that contract will look ugly

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I really think some of you just like rehashing the same argument about the same stuff over and over again lol 

I went to both events last year and they were a good time. I'm not going Wednesday but I might go Saturday, I'm going to the Red Bulls game at 7pm so not really keen on spending the whole day in the area or driving back and forth since it's so much time to kill. 

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