New Jersey Devils: What Can We Expect From Beau Bennett?
Right Winger Beau Bennett is a bit of an enigma. He has been praised for his offensive capabilities, but has never been able to stay healthy long enough to develop. If he can on his new team, he can potentially be a key piece for the New Jersey Devils in their push for a playoff position.
Beau Bennett was acquired by the Devils at this years draft in a trade with Pittsburgh, in return we sent one of our third round picks (77 overall). Not only does this acquisition address our lack of right wing depth, but it gets us even closer to becoming a team of all former Penguins players. On a serious note, there is a lot of mystery surrounding this kid because since he has been drafted he has never played a full season in the NHL, in fact he’s only played more than 40 games once in 2014-2015 when he played a personal best 49 games. Because of this, it’s become pretty difficult to predict where he will fall on this team come October. Will he be a primary scorer or will he be more of a depth player? Well to answer that let’s take a look at some numbers.
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Looking back at his first season in the league, he put up a respectable 14 points in 26 games. As a rookie, those are not horrible numbers. The following season, he slumped with only 7 points and an even more alarming 21 games. His longest season as mentioned earlier, with 49 games, he only managed to muster 12 points. His point totals are not particularly impressive at first glance, but we have to consider that he was playing on a very talented Pittsburgh roster, where he likely was not getting the minutes he may have needed to develop. It’s hard to judge a player like Beau, who excels in playing a more offensive game, when hes playing on a 4th line for 10 minutes a night. New Jersey is a good destination for a player like him because we can give him the opportunity to earn the ice time, whereas in Pittsburgh that definitely was not as easy.
The way I see it, he can go one of two ways: He can do what Devante Smith-Pelly did and use the opportunity to put points on the board and become a staple of his new club, or he could continue the old trend of playing 20ish games and getting hurt for the rest of the season. With that said, I do believe that because of our lack of depth at the right wing position, I believe that Beau Bennett will have the best season of his career this year.
With all that said, let’s put down the numbers for a second and talk about what kind of player Beau Bennett is. He is not a grinder, he is not the kind of player that’s going to be banging bodies left and right. What he is though, is a young player with a good offensive upside in a position that the Devils are sorely lacking in. He has the potential to score goals, and rack up points. Two things that few players on the Devils are capable of doing regularly. He has the hands, he has the creativity, all he needs now is a place where he can put his assets to good use, and I think that New Jersey is the place for that.
But where will he play? I think that early on in the season he’ll get a shot in the second/third line RW role, which will allow him to get ice time with some quality players. If he plays well here, I think he can easily cement himself as our second line right winger, because after Kyle Palmieri there aren’t a whole lot of other players who can play in that role. At the end of the day though, this is all speculation and the trade for Beau Bennett could very possibly be the first real mistake that Ray Shero has made since taking the helm as general manager of the Devils. The possibility of picking up another Kyle Palmieri type player while only losing a third round pick is very tempting, and even if Beau doesn’t pan out the way we want him to I do believe that trades like this are what will put our franchise back on the winning track.