Draft Profile: Landon Nycz

Landon Nycz is a defenseman for the UMass Minutemen who is eligible for this upcoming draft. He’s known as a talented skater with good size whose hands and hockey IQ are doubtful. The consensus rating puts him in the third round. 

Nycz is a left-shot defenseman from Detroit. At 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds, he’s already the size that NHL teams like their defenseman to be, which is a significant advantage for him. In Detroit elite youth hockey, you either skate for Honeybaked or Compuware — Nycz played with Compuware in his U14 season. 

In 2023, the Waterloo Black Hawks of the USHL drafted Nycz 133rd overall in the USHL Futures draft. In his time with the Black Hawks, Nycz developed into a solid power-play player with a talent for distributing the puck. That would continue in his stint with the Sioux City Musketeers, where he was traded midseason in 2024-25. 

Despite that power play prowess, I would not categorize Nycz as an offensive defenseman. He doesn’t put up enough points to clear any threshold you could set for it; in this year at UMass, he had just three points over 38 games. But UMass is not perhaps the best representation of that skill given that he wasn’t playing top pair or top line minutes. With the Minutemen, he still demonstrated his ability to walk the blue line and his strong skating with good edgework. 

Speaking to scouts about him, I got a lot of mixed reviews. Some of them were extremely ambivalent, with one scout literally replying, “meh.” Most of them, however, could see the potential. He’s big, he can skate and he can make plays. Nycz’s issues are primarily that he’s not offensive enough to be a true power-play quarterback but hasn’t rounded out his game enough in other areas to evolve into something else. Another scout told me they think his future is contingent on how effectively he can learn to use his body. I’ll be curious to see what he looks like next year at UMass with hopefully an increased role. I have him going in the fourth round.