Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
It’s the maturity and composure that really jump out most with Cleveland Monsters rookie Denton Mateychuk.
Certainly the on-ice components are there in the 20-year-old’s game. Mobile. Moves the puck quite well. He is 5-foot-11, 185 pounds, but strong hockey sense and instincts allow him to handle the game’s wear and tear, taking on a heavy workload each night.
All of the must-haves for a top-end defenseman of this era, Mateychuk has them.
It’s easy to see what the Columbus Blue Jackets saw in the Manitoba native when they chose him 12th overall in the 2022 NHL Draft. Mateychuk further justified that pick last season in captaining Moose Jaw of the Western Hockey League to a league championship and a berth in the Memorial Cup. He was named most valuable player of the WHL postseason, delivering 30 points (11 goals, 19 assists) in 20 playoff games, and earned a spot on the Memorial Cup tournament all-star team. All of that followed an exceptional regular season, as Mateychuk won the Bill Hunter Memorial Trophy as the WHL’s defenseman of the year after a 75-point (17 goals, 58 assists) effort in only 52 games. He also represented Canada at the 2024 IIHF World Junior Championship.
So it’s clear why Monsters head coach Trent Vogelhuber could feel comfortable inserting Mateychuk, then still only 19, into an exceptionally high-stakes, high-pressure situation in the Eastern Conference Finals against Hershey last spring. Cleveland had dropped the first three games of the best-of-seven series, and it looked like an impressive season was near its end.
Mateychuk immediately fit in despite the difficult circumstances. His solid debut in Game 4 at Cleveland, just six days after he had been competing for the Memorial Cup, helped the Monsters to extend their season. He went on to record an assist in each of his next three games – including setting up the overtime winner in Game 6 – and it quickly seemed like he had been a regular all season rather than someone who had just arrived.
The experience made an impression on Mateychuk as he headed into the summer and his offseason training program, which included work on improving his shot.
“Having that experience, playing in those games, seeing the structure – the little details that are so easily overlooked,” Mateychuk said, “you’ve got to take an extra second to think about and put in the work to see that.”
It was a shortened summer for Mateychuk but he came ready to go in Columbus, captaining the Blue Jackets’ entry at the Buffalo Sabres Prospect Challenge. He then got a serious look in NHL preseason play, and ended up staying with the Blue Jackets until the end of training camp when they finally sent him to Cleveland. Columbus has a crowded defense corps in the NHL, which allows young prospects like Mateychuk, David Jiricek and Corson Ceulemans – all recent first-round draft picks – to continue coming along in the AHL.
The Monsters will bring a six-game winning streak into this weekend as they host Milwaukee on Saturday and Sunday. At 10-4-0-1, Cleveland holds third place in what is looking like it will be an exceptionally strong North Division field this season. With 16 points (six goals, 10 assists) in 15 games, Mateychuk has himself first among defensemen and only three points off the overall AHL scoring lead. Last week he amassed seven points in four games, including back-to-back overtime game-winners at Providence, to earn the Howies Hockey Tape/AHL Player of the Week award.
For now, the Blue Jackets are able to let Mateychuk continue to develop with Cleveland. Eventually, of course, Columbus management will have to make a decision, but that is hardly a bad problem to have. Mateychuk, whose intensity quickly earned him attention from TSN at last winter’s World Junior Championship, has taken this time in Cleveland as another step in his journey. When the Blue Jackets assigned him to Cleveland, they gave him a straightforward objective.
“‘You’re going to have a good opportunity here at the start of the year,’” he recounted the Blue Jackets telling him. “‘Take advantage of it.’
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”
On the American Hockey League beat for two decades, TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.