Former All-Star Cory Schneider has been placed on waivers.

A surprising move from the Devils.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 4 years ago
Former All-Star Cory Schneider has been placed on waivers.
Jacob Kupferman/CSM/Zuma

This has been a shocking fall from grace for former All-Star goaltender Cory Schneider and it seems like this may be the low point in his career thus far. 

According to a rather stunning report from the New Jersey Devils organization the team has just placed Schneider on waivers for the purpose of demoting him to the American Hockey League where he would join the Binghamton Devils, New Jersey's AHL affiliate team. The move comes as a surprise if only due to Schneider's pedigree in the league as a once great goaltender, but if we are being honest his recent performances have come nowhere near that former standard of play and he maintains a rather large cap hit for the Devils in spite of his precipitous decline in form. 

The Devils saw fit to use Schneider in just 6 games this far in the 2019 - 2020 National Hockey League regular season and through those first 6 games Schneider managed to post just an ugly 4.59 goals against average and an equally poor .852 save percentage. The reality of the situation is simply that those numbers are not good enough to compete at the NHL level and when you add to that the fact that Schneider is eating up a significant chunk of New Jersey's cap space it simply makes keeping him at the NHL level simply untenable, even as a backup goaltender. 

The trouble here of course for general manager Ray Shero is that not only does Schneider continue to carry a cap hit of $6,000,000 for the remainder of this season, but he also will have to deal with that cap hit for 2 more years as Schneider's contract runs through the 2021 - 2022 NHL regular season. Additionally although Schneider is almost certainly now viewed as an untradable asset for the Devils the matter is made all the more complicated due to the fact that Schneider has a full no trade clause for the full duration of his current deal. That means that even if the Devils were to try and trade Schneider to a team for the purpose of a buyout, or to a floor team in need of additional salary, the 33 year old netminder could simply choose to block any such move.

This is an ugly situation for both the player and the organization.

Source: