Eliminated Devils take solace in offseason moves paying off

It’s that time of the NHL season where a few fanbases start buying playoff tickets while the rest turn their attention to MLB spring training. Elimination is no fun. But it shouldn’t color your whole fandom with tears. Just most of it. 70 percent of it.

This is the 30 percent: SB Nation NHL Silver Linings, where we send hockey’s eliminated teams into the offseason with five good things to remember from this season.

Boy, remember when we started this series a month ago with the Avalanche?

It took about a month for any other team to visit the playoff elimination block. They’re that bad.

But welcome to offseason vacation meetings, Devils. Your season ended with a horrid two months and a ton of questions left to answer. But there were some bright spots.

Let’s focus on those.

When he was healthy, anyway.

By the time this season finishes, Hall will have at least three Edmonton years with more points than his debut in New Jersey. But factor in injuries and he lands in heady company: of players with 65 or fewer games under their belt this year, only Evgeni Malkin, Johnny Gaudreau, Jack Eichel, Aleksander Barkov, and T.J. Oshie have more than Hall’s 50 points. And he still leads the Devils in points after all that time off the ice.

GM Ray Shero wanted a legitimate scoring threat to build around. We can officially say he found it.

Some will call this a weak draft year, and they might be right. But you counter that lack of quality with quantity of picks at your disposal, and you increase your odds of landing a gem.

New Jersey is primed to do that with 19 picks over the next two drafts, 10 of which come this June. This season proved the franchise is far from the rebuild finish line, and infusing the talent pool with 10 fresh faces is a heck of an opportunity.

Palmieri emerged from bottom-six anonymity to become a Devils linchpin last season. The Devils rewarded him with a five-year, $23.25 million contract.

That raised some eyebrows. That kind of commitment meant the Devils believed Palmieri wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan player punching above his weight class on a terrible team.

As it turns out, they were right. Palmieri could still surpass his career-high 30-goal mark set last year and is tied with Hall for the Devils’ lead in points. In a season of disappointments, Palmieri stood out as a rare reward.

All those previous high draft picks had to pay off at some point, right?

Michael McLeod, drafted 12th overall in 2016, emerged as a leader for the OHL’s Mississauga Steelheads with 73 points in 57 games. It’s not a stretch to imagine McLeod making the Devils out of training camp next year.

His Mississauga teammate and fellow Devils prospect Nathan Bastian isn’t as close to NHL-ready, but he’s enjoyed a nice season as well.

New Jersey sent a few players to the 2017 World Juniors, and both center Blake Speers (Canada) and defenseman Yegor Rykov (Russia) left scouts impressed. Speers played three games in the NHL this year, too, an indication he’s ready for the pros.

It’s not easy to keep your goals-against average under 3.00 and save percentage over .900 on a team as bad as the Devils.

But there Schneider sits, with a 2.71 GAA and a .911 SV%. Neither are great. In fact, one could argue Schneider has merely been good.

He’s also steady, and you can’t ask much more from a goalie on an awful team. Schneider’s stats are unremarkable, but middle of the road on a poor team is much better than awful goaltending on a good team. (Just ask the Dallas Stars.)

Cory Schneider is still capable of elite goaltending. In that sense, the Devils are already miles ahead of most teams in this stage of a rebuild.