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1) The Albany Devils' season reached its end on Friday night as they fell, 2-1, at the hands of the Toronto Marlies in triple overtime.
While it took almost 5.5 periods to decide a winner, the game wasn't as close as the scoreline suggests.
The Marlies outshot the Devils 60-31 and were the much better team. Mackenzie Blackwood was the only reason the A-Devs had a chance, which is a little discouraging in some ways. The reason I say that: Albany had eight players spend time in the NHL this season while Toronto only had had two, one of which (Sergey Kalinin) was with the Devils. To be dominated in such a fashion with the season on the line is pretty disappointing.
The biggest positive from last night -- and the playoffs as a whole -- was the play of Blackwood. He started the season very slowly but put it together down the stretch and ended up finishing with a .907 save percentage, which is respectable for a 20-year-old rookie. Blackwood then upped his game in the playoffs stopping .928% of the shots he faced.
I think he needs another year in Albany but I wouldn't be surprised if he is an NHLer in 2018-19.
2) The NHL draft lottery goes tonight at 8 p.m. eastern. The Devils will enter the lottery with the 5th best chance (8.5%) of winning the top pick and a better chance of grabbing a top-3 pick.
While unlikely, I believe they had less than half the chance of winning the lottery when they moved up to draft Adam Larsson a handful of years ago.
To me, even standing pat would be a positive. That would guarantee at least one of my personal top-5 choices (Nolan Patrick/Nico Hischier, Miro Heiskanen, Gabriel Vilardi, Owen Tippett) would be on the board. I'd be content with that.
3) I'll get more into off-season targets in the coming weeks but one under-the-radar player I'd be after is defenseman Nate Schmidt of the Washington Capitals. He is a fluid skater, very effective breaking the puck out of the zone and I think his counting numbers would go up quite a bit with consistent ice time.
Acquiring Schmidt is probably a lot more realistic if the Capitals re-sign Karl Alzner or Kevin Shattenkirk so we'll have to see how that plays out.
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