In large part due to the team's offensive struggles, the Devils haven't won a lot of games this year, and the 2014-15 campaign has turned into a transition season to develop their young defensemen.
Lost in the fog of rookie Damon Severson's excellent start and Adam Larsson's strong play of late has been the poor play of 2nd year pro Jon Merrill.
Coming off a respectable rookie campaign where he held his own eating up a decent chunk of minutes, Merrill has looked lost at times this year, and his development seems to be heading in the wrong direction.
He's never been - and likely never will be - a points guy and plus-minus is a bad stat, so I took to the underlying numbers to see how Merrill's 2014-15 season stacks up to his rookie campaign. The numbers weren't very encouraging.
In 2013-14 the Devils were worse with Jon Merrill on the ice in terms of generating a lesser percentage of the shot attempts and scoring chances. That said, the Devils were still better than 50% with him on the ice, so he was the victim of posting good numbers on a very good possession team more than anything else.
This year, however, the Devils possession numbers have dipped dramatically, and Merrill's been even further below team average than last year.
On top of his declining underlying numbers, Merrill is averaging 1.95 shots/60 of 5 vs 5 (.5 lower than last season) and he's averaging almost three less individual shot attempts/60 of 5 vs 5.
He has played less than 100 NHL games, and is only 22 years of age, so it's certainly way too early to write Merrill off, but his play this season hasn't been encouraging.
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