With just six days until the puck drops on the regular season, the Blue Jackets have 10 defensemen remaining on the roster. There are the virtual locks to make the roster: Zach Werenski, Ivan Provorov, Damon Severson, and Erik Gudbranson. Adam Boqvist and Andrew Peeke are likely to make the roster, which leaves Nick Blankenburg, Jake Bean, Denton Mateychuk, and David Jiricek competing for that seventh spot, assuming the team carries a seventh defenseman.
However, it gets interesting when considering Mateychuk and Jiricek. Mateychuk is under 20 years old, so he is either going to play in the NHL or the CHL this season. Jiricek is also still a teenager, but played in Europe before he was drafted so he can play in the AHL as he did last season. There's no way the Blue Jackets would have either of them on the NHL roster as a seventh defenseman who barely plays, so those two players are competing for one of the six spots in the everyday lineup.
The play of the team's two 2022 first-round picks has certainly forced the powers that be to make some tough decisions in the coming days.
Blue Jackets head coach Pascal Vincent said that while Mateychuk has made a case to make the team, he doesn't want to rush him, or any other prospect. He used current Winnipeg Jets star defenseman Josh Morrissey as an example. Morrissey was the 13th pick in the 2013 NHL Draft, and played 106 WHL games and 65 AHL games over the next two seasons before making his NHL debut.
"There's a huge value to not [progressing] too quick in your career," Vincent said on Monday. "We don't want any of our players to make the jump too quick and they have to adjust their style with limited ice time and they develop like a fifth, sixth, or seventh defenseman when we think they could be a [number] one, two, or three."
Vincent compared the development of young prospects to the baking of a cake.
"I have this vision about our young prospects," Vincent said. "So you bake your stuff, you put it in the oven, it's gotta cook properly in order to be a good cake. If you take it out too early, it's not good."
He added that they want to be 100% sure that the player is ready for the NHL when they are called up.
Ideally, the Blue Jackets would like the NHLers who count at least $2M against the cap on the roster, like Bean ($2.33M), Boqvist ($2.6M), and Peeke ($2.75M), to be productive players this season, so then they can send Jiricek and Mateychuk back to the AHL and CHL, respectively, for more seasoning. Then next year, when Bean is an RFA and the two prospects are theoretically more ready, you call them up to be full-time NHLers and make the necessary corresponding moves.
However, we do not live in an ideal world. Mateychuk has been arguably the team's best defenseman in training camp, and Jiricek has also performed well. If they are two of the six best blue-liners on the team, they should be playing in the NHL. If the team wants to send a message about competing and earning a spot, they have to back that up with actions.
What is most likely? Mateychuk gets sent back to Moose Jaw and Jiricek goes to Cleveland to start the year and we have this conversation again at this time next year. However, the fact that those two are still on the roster shows that they could actually make the team this year.
