Armchair Hockey Scout

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2025-26 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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5

Denton Mateychuk

Columbus Blue Jackets Defense

45 games at 21, 5-11, and a defenceman whose development matters more to this club than anybody's.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2024-25CBJ454913+420000449.118:02
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—454913+420000449.118:02

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

4 goals and 9 assists in 45 games for 13 points, plus-4, on 18:02 a night in his first NHL season.

43.9 per cent at five-on-five, the 11th percentile, over 657 minutes. His on-ice goals were 29-31 against an expected 21-27, which is eight goals of finishing above expectation — the rating and the plus-4 both need discounting.

The Finesse Game

The skating is the whole player and it is very good — he escapes pressure by changing direction, he carries out of his own zone under control, and he is comfortable joining a rush at 21.

The puck decisions are already better than most first-year defencemen’s. 44 shots in 45 games is modest volume and the offence has not translated yet; the passing is where the value will be.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 188, and it is the whole question. He cannot clear a net front, loses board battles to NHL forwards, and against a heavy forecheck the puck goes in behind him.

20 penalty minutes over 45 games is a high rate for a rookie of this size, and it reflects being beaten more than being aggressive.

The Intangibles

A first-round pick, a dominant junior career, and 45 NHL games at 21 in a top-four role on a club that was in a playoff race.

He is the second-most important development in the organisation after Adam Fantilli. The pattern to watch is the one every small offensive defenceman faces: whether a system and a partner can be found that let the skating matter more than the size.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

  • a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
  • he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

  • transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control

    “he escapes pressure by changing direction, he carries out of his own zone under control, and he is comfortable joining a rush at 21”

  • playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “the passing is where the value will be”

  • clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net

    “He cannot clear a net front, loses board battles to NHL forwards, and against a heavy forecheck the puck goes in behind him.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “He cannot clear a net front, loses board battles to NHL forwards, and against a heavy forecheck the puck goes in behind him.”

  • fouls-when-beatena strength· the stick foul that follows losing a step

    “20 penalty minutes over 45 games is a high rate for a rookie of this size, and it reflects being beaten more than being aggressive.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 657 minutes

Expected goals
43.9%
12th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
44.7%
11th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 29 for, 31 against. Expected: 20.9 and 26.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
30th
Numbers
12th

The two rank him within 18 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.

Both bars are percentiles among the 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 69 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2024-25 · 45 games

Top speed
21.7 mph
52nd pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.6

Bursts over 20 mph
0.60 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.74 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
91.8 mph
59th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 89.7

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2024-25 · 657 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2024-25

The club
CBJ took 48.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.9% — 4.4 below the club he did it on.
The role
Second pair, 657 minutes at five-on-five — 25th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Ivan Provorov42.8%46.5%48.4%
Dmitri Voronkov47.5%41.8%51.4%
Adam Fantilli48.2%41.9%44.6%

42.8% together, 46.5% for him apart and 48.4% for Provorov apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

69 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 4 of them goals. His median goal came from 43 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 61% from beyond forty.