The Devils best players are all kids. They have skating and stick skills but you need more than just skill to be a good team. It's like the Oilers teams when they had Hall and Yakupov and Nugent-Hopkins and a shit defense. Goaltending has sucked but that's also a product of bad defending. They moved on from Severson and Graves last summer and then Hamilton got hurt again and it left them with Marino, Siegenthaler and Smith as their experienced guys and at best the first two are No. 4's and Smith is a bottom pair. It's almost like they need Luke Hughes and Nemec to be top flight defensemen and they'll probably get there someday but it's too much too soon right now. It's somewhat the same to lesser degree amongst their forwards. To me Jack, Jesper and Mercer are guys who if you were to meet up with them in the playoffs you'd want to knock around because they're all kind of scrawny still and as the season winds down and the games are getting more physical they're all kind of wilting right now.
As a team they've been a bad or a much worse mix than they were last year.