Allow me to turn the clock back to one of the more frustrating New Jersey Devils seasons of my lifetime, if you will.
It’s 2013. The Devils, knowing the end of the Martin Brodeur era was near with him entering the final season of his contract, acquired the then 26-year-old Cory Schneider from the Vancouver Canucks for the 9th overall pick of the 2013 draft. The idea was that Schneider would eventually take the reigns for the Devils as their #1 goaltender, and he did. But there was that one buffer
year where both Brodeur and Schneider were on the roster at the same time.
The reason I call the 2013-14 season frustrating was that the Devils, despite all of their flaws, could’ve made the playoffs that season. Not because they were good offensively….they were actually bad, ranking 27th of 30 teams with 2.40 goals per game. Not because that team wasn’t dreadful in the shootout, because they were, going 0-13 in the skills competition. They were frustrating for those reasons, but those are talent issues that are mostly beyond the coach’s control.
They were frustrating because despite having the goaltender of their future on the roster, they were stuck in the past deferring to a franchise icon in Brodeur. Despite Schneider having a better save percentage (.921 to .901) and goals saved above expected (4.5 vs. -18.2), the younger and better goaltender got barely over half of the starts.
I get that handling a declining superstar can be a delicate situation….one where there might be some backstage politics at play…..but when you’re offensively challenged like the Devils were and you’re trying to make the playoffs, you can’t afford to leave points on the table. The Devils wound up missing the playoffs by five points that season. They probably wouldn’t have done anything had they somehow gotten to the playoffs, but you never know. Their decision making when it came to picking the wrong goaltender to play had just as much to do with them not making it as the other reasons I pointed out.
A few years ago when John wrote about whether or not league average goaltending could make the Devils a playoff team, one of the rules of thumb he cited is that a goal differential improvement of six goals is roughly worth a win in the standings. The Devils were -11 that season. I wouldn’t say its as easy as saying if their differential was zero, they would have two more wins. I also wouldn’t say that if they could score a few more goals here and there, that’s another win and now all of a sudden they’re a playoff team. But it does go to show that when you’re close, those goals you’re giving up as well as the goals you’re not scoring add up, and it will cost you in the standings.
Fast forward to this season, and while it’s not an apples to apples comparison, there are some similarities between this team and that team.
Like the 2013-14 Devils, this team is also offensively challenged, scoring 2.61 goals per game (28th of 32 teams). Also like that team, the Devils have a goaltender who has clearly been the better option between the two. Jake Allen might not be the Devils goaltender of the future, per se, as he like Markstrom is also 35 years old. But he’s clearly been the better of the two options for the last two seasons now. Despite Allen having a better save percentage (.908 vs. .879) and goals saved above expected (7.2 vs. -11.2), Markstrom has gotten more starts. The Devils goal differential also sits at -21 as of this writing. With better goaltending and a better offense, the Devils are probably in the Top 3 of the Metropolitan. But they’re not.
Markstrom has gotten more starts than Allen despite that fact that….
- He’s allowed 3 or more goals in 18 of his 28 appearances.
- He has saved 90% or better of the shots on goal he’s faces in only 9 of those 28 appearances.
- His performance against the Islanders back on January 6th was the single worst single performance by any goaltender ever, in terms of goals saved above expected, since they started tracking that stat.
- Of all goaltenders with 25 appearances this season, he ranks 27th of 29 in goals saved above expected at -9.7. Only Linus Ullmark and Jordan Binnington have been worse.
- He’s 27th of 29 in save percentage at .879. Only Bobrovsky and Binnington are worse.
- He’s 26th of 29 in GAA at 3.29. Only Kevin Lankinen, Yaroslav Askarov, and Binnington are worse.
- He’s 27th of 29 goaltenders in WAR at -1.86. Only Ullmark and Binnington are worse.
- He’s 29th of 29 goaltenders in low danger unblocked save percentage at .944. In other words, no other goaltender is allowing more soft “he’s gotta have that one” goals than Markstrom. He’s not making the easy saves.
- He’s 26th of 29 goaltenders in high danger unblocked save percentage at .707. Which also checks out with how much it seems like Markstrom is just flailing around and guessing out there more than reading the play. He’s not making the hard saves either.
I could keep going but you get the point. Use whatever metric you want. Jacob Markstrom has been dreadful this season to the point where he’s one of the worst goaltenders in the league. He’s been bad to the point where he’s unplayable.
How Does Markstrom Compare To Recent Bad Devils Goaltenders
Of course, Markstrom isn’t the first Devils goaltender in recent memory to be deemed ‘unplayable’.
Before Vitek Vanecek was dealt to the San Jose Sharks as a cap dump, he posted an .890 and -11.2 goals saved above expected. In 2021-22, Jon Gillies posted an .887 and -16.5 goals saved above expected. Andrew Hammond wasn’t any better down the stretch with an .879 and -6.7. Mackenzie Blackwood that year was in and out of the lineup with injuries and posted an .892 with a -12.7. Blackwood was better the following season, but was oft-injured again and ultimately lost his spot to Vanecek and Akira Schmid before he was traded away that offseason as well. All of those players were ‘unplayable’ before they were ultimately discarded.
In fairness, most of those players I just mentioned aren’t NHL goaltenders. Gillies and Hammond are out of the league. Vanecek hasn’t been any better since he left New Jersey and is now serving as the backup in Utah. Blackwood has been healthier and better on one of the best teams in the league.
At the time, I thought the goaltenders were the victims of a poor coaching staff. I thought Lindy Ruff’s “offense first, defense optional” system put the goaltenders in a position to fail. I still think Dave Rogalski is unqualified to be an NHL goaltending coach, and how he continues to be employed by the Devils when he’s made zero goaltenders better in the half decade or so he’s been here is mind-boggling.
Markstrom, despite being the most decorated goaltender of any of them, has been worse than ALL of them. And this is with him playing in a more defensive-oriented system under Sheldon Keefe than the one the team played in under the previous coach.
Think about that for a moment.
The Devils are trying to play a more responsible game defensively. They (correctly) moved on from the previous goaltenders who couldn’t make a save. They gave up a first round pick and a solid NHL defenseman in Kevin Bahl because they were trying to solve their goaltending woes once and for all with a proven player in Markstrom.
Markstrom has been even worse than the previous options.
And now they’re stuck.
The Markstrom Contract Extension Has Already Been a Colossal Failure
It’s not like the warning signs with Markstrom didn’t exist before this season.
Markstrom was solid in his first season in New Jersey, posting a .900 save percentage and 3.4 goals saved above expected. He was also very good at making high-danger stops. It’s easy to forget now but there were a lot of games where the main reason why the Devils got any result out of it at all was because of Markstrom. Of course, Allen was better last year too, but I can understand the Devils not wanting to overplay Allen (and not just because of the draft pick stipulation attached to Allen from when they got him from Montreal) when they got good play out of Markstrom.
But a deeper look under the hood showed Markstrom struggled last year with low danger shots, as has been his MO for several seasons prior to that. It might explain why his stats have fluctuated as much as they have from year-to-year throughout his career.
When I broached this topic of whether or not they Devils should consider extending him in the summer, my takeaway was that they shouldn’t be in any rush to do so. Despite what Tom Fitzgerald said at his press conference a few weeks ago, the Devils did exactly that. The Devils were comfortable with the idea of extending him even though he had yet to play well THIS season. They announced the deal two days after I wrote that. And when pressed on why he signed Markstrom when he did, Fitzgerald pointed to the five game playoff series loss against Carolina.
Keep in mind who Carolina is as a hockey team. I’m not sure any team in the league does a better job of peppering the opposition with low-percentage, low-danger shots. Despite this, Markstrom still got beat three times in Game 1. He got beat four times in Game 4. He blew a 3-0 lead in a span of about 4 minutes of game time in Game 5, and despite making key saves, he ultimately got beat in double overtime. I’m not trying to retroactively pin the series loss on Markstrom, but its interesting that Fitzgerald publicly cites that small sample size as the reasoning to do the deal while ignoring the early season small sample size. Or while ignoring the larger sample size of the previous season.
By the way, Markstrom has an .889 save percentage since putting pen to paper on that extension. He has had his moments here and there, but he’s been nowhere near good enough on a consistent basis.
I don’t write this after the fact to take a victory lap. I didn’t pull the receipts of what I previously wrote to show how smart I think I am. These were obvious first-guesses that extending a 35-year old goaltender might not be the best idea. Given his age and recent injury history at the time, there was no reason why the Devils shouldn’t have taken a wait and see approach and see what Markstrom would be this season before committing to him. If he was actually good and it cost the Devils more money than the $6M AAV they committed to him, I can at least live with that because he had been playing well and helping the Devils win games. If not, it might be a bitter pill to swallow after giving up a 1st rounder and Bahl for him, but at least you had an out. They could’ve simply decided to go in a different direction.
The Devils instead chose Option C, which was to extend him and box themselves into a corner.
You know a contract is a bad contract when the extension hasn’t even kicked in yet and you’re already trying to find a way out of it. It’s a bad contract when you’re already wondering whether or not the Devils should buy it out. And while the Devils might ultimately find a way out of it with fairly light trade protection in 2027-28 (a 5-team no trade list), it doesn’t change the fact that the Devils need Markstrom to be better now.
It’s one thing to have a bad forward or defenseman making a lot of money on your books. At least there, the coach can potentially hide it to some extent. They can move them down the lineup where they’ll have minimal impact in the minutes they do play, or they can simply scratch the player and play a better option.
You can’t hide bad goaltenders in a league where teams carry two goaltenders and only two goaltenders at any given time. Your backup goaltender is going to play a lot. The days of a Martin Brodeur playing 70+ games a year are long gone. Your workhorse goaltenders in 2025-26 will barely play 60 games, if they even reach that threshold.
The Devils don’t have any choice other than to hope Markstrom is better than he’s shown. And hope is not a plan.
Final Thoughts
If the Devils are serious about trying to make a playoff push for this season, they need to realize that points are at a premium. The Devils roster is what it is at this point. They can’t score.
I understand that there are concerns about whether Allen would hold up with a heavier workload. But the Devils schedule actually is pretty favorable for Allen to get an extended run as a starter. The Devils have no back-to-backs before the Olympic break. Allen isn’t going to the Olympics while Markstrom is for Sweden. The Devils do have six back-to-backs remaining post-Olympics, but most goaltenders don’t play both ends of a back-to-back anyways. There’s ample time for Allen to play, but not be overworked.
Going back to the Brodeur-Schneider comparison I made earlier, Allen is certainly no Schneider given his age. But Markstrom is no Brodeur either. Brodeur, who was also arguably better in his final season as a Devil than Markstrom is now despite being 41 years old at the time, is a franchise legend who earned the goodwill of Devils fans throughout the years for being a key member of their three championship teams. Markstrom might be a respected veteran around the league and in that locker room, but he hasn’t earned that level of goodwill from Devils fans in his year and a half as a Devil.
I thought Markstrom was dreadful enough against Vancouver the other night where he earned a benching despite the win. His glove continues to be leaky. His rebound control is awful. He overcommits all the time and is always seemingly out of position. I don’t know if he’s physically compromised and playing through a nagging injury (which would be bad), or if this is just who he is as a player at this stage of his career (which is also bad). Either way, I was convinced that Sheldon Keefe saw this as well and figured he would give Jake Allen the final start of a long road trip. But I was wrong and Keefe went in the other direction against Seattle.
Keefe knows his team better than I do, but he also needs to be right when he makes these calls. He said himself after Sunday’s game that the Devils can’t score at 5v5, so he’s well aware of that particular issue with the team. Yes, the Devils need to defend better as Keefe alluded to, but they also need to make the right call when it comes to which goaltender to play. Otherwise, you have games like Seattle where the goaltender is a big part of the reason why you lose.
The Devils have already given away too many points this season where their margin for error is razor thin. Its more likely they miss the playoffs than make it at this point. The “big game hunting” goaltender they acquired in an attempt to fix the goaltending once and for all hasn’t worked out to this point.
That’s not to say that it can’t work out in the future. Or that other players on the Devils need to be better to not put so much riding on whether the goaltender has it on any given night. All of this can be, and is, true. But the Devils aren’t helping themselves either by being stubborn with their approach. They doubled down on Markstrom by signing him to an ill-advised extension that everybody but the GM of the team knew was a bad idea, and are now tripling-down by playing him as much as they are. And if they don’t change their approach soon, they’re going to run out of time and waste another season.
If and when that happens, there’s a good chance that Markstrom is still here next year. But if it does, the GM who gave him that contract and the coach who continues playing him probably shouldn’t be.
(Stats do not include the 1/27/26 game vs. Winnipeg. All goaltender stats courtesy of MoneyPuck)
