Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews, right, shoots against St. Louis Blues goaltender Joel Hofer during the first period at Enterprise Center in St. Louis, Mo. on Feb. 19.Jeff Curry/Reuters
Last weekend, Mitch Marner opened a restaurant. Not him personally, but the way people talked about it, you’d think so.
It’s the sort of place targeted at guys who were not cool in high school, but have made some money since. A lot of rich, Corinthian leather and art for people who don’t get art. During Friday’s soft opening, the place – called Blue Bovine – was absolutely rammed.
Marner, as one of the investors, arrived when the party was mid-swing and tucked himself in a corner. He drew a crowd. His crowd wasn’t as big as Mayor Olivia Chow’s crowd, which wasn’t as big as former mayor John Tory’s crowd, which was nowhere near as big as former Leaf Wendel Clark’s crowd.
Clark wasn’t hiding anywhere. He was circulating. Wherever Clark went, a trail of sixtysomething guys wearing jackets that fit before the pandemic followed behind him.
This is the visible difference between a very good Leaf and a great Leaf.
Numbers don’t define it. Absent actual winning, it’s purely perception. How many years and how much blood did you give to Conn Smythe’s army?
Amongst those who are still vital, Clark is the prime mover. You can try making Doug Gilmour/Mats Sundin/Darryl Sittler arguments, but your heart’s not in it. Clark is still everyone’s idea of the perfect Leaf.
That title isn’t in imminent danger, but a challenger is emerging from the west.
Until fairly recently, you’d have put Auston Matthews in the second tier of historic Leafs talent. Like a lot of men in that category he has world-beating ability, but it hasn’t added up to much in aggregate. He scores a lot of goals, but his intangibles are intangible. He’s never given a memorable speech nor provided a transcendent off-ice moment. He’d certainly hasn’t shed much blood for the team.
Over his eight years here, Matthews has often struck you as a more gifted Phil Kessel. The sort of player with a lot of untapped upside you could see doing very well once he leaves Toronto.
That perception has begun to shift in the past couple of weeks. It’s not that Matthews is scoring goals – he’s always done that. It’s that he’s begun to score a lot more goals than everyone else and seemingly at will.
Toronto cannot resist any story in which it is thriving in comparison to its betters. Even when it doesn’t matter.
On Monday, the Leafs played a noon game in St. Louis. Matthews was coming off two hat-tricks in two games.
He hit a post in the first period and flubbed twice in the second. The Leafs started the third period on the power play. While his teammates circulated the puck around the back of the Blues net, Matthews circled predatorily near the blueline. Then, in that way he has, he began drifting in toward the unguarded goal. The only thing missing was the ‘Na nah, na nah, na nah …’ John Williams soundtrack.
Marner found him alone 20 feet in front of net. Matthews buried it. The Leafs went on to win 4-2. Along with their main guy, they’re on a nice, little hot streak right now.
Matthews now sits one goal shy of 50. Fair guess that he manages to hit that mark in his hometown of Phoenix on Wednesday. What are the Coyotes going to do to stop him? Pelt him with water bottles? Because they can’t defend him.
That would give Matthews 50 in 54 games. Once again, he would become the fastest to that mark since Mario Lemieux did 50 in 50 back in 1995-96.
What does that blizzard of numbers mean? Nothing. If you assume the Leafs would be a playoff team without him – which they probably would – less than nothing.
Jonathan Marchessault scored 28 goals last year – sad. Then he scored 13 in the playoffs and Vegas won a Stanley Cup. Only one of those numbers matters.
If Wayne Gretzky had scored a bajillion points and Edmonton never won a Cup, we’d be embarrassed to talk about it now. Instead, he remains the unrealistic benchmark for all NHLers. As years pass, Gretzky’s main function seems to be preventing modern hockey players from getting too worked up by how little they are paid, relative to the other leagues. You think you deserve $40-million a year? Well, Wayne Gretzky did the job of two top forwards for a quarter of the money. So take it easy.
Numbers don’t mean much in hockey, but maybe they can in Toronto. Until Matthews, the Leafs have never had a best-in-the-league-type scorer.
There’s an argument to be made that they’ve had something better over the years – Wendel Clark, Dave Keon, George Armstrong types who would score when the occasion demanded it, or bash your head in otherwise. The best periods in Leafs history have come when the team had very little finesse.
Matthews has plenty of it, but until now it hasn’t been enough to change the internal calculus. Every postseason, the Leafs try to transform themselves into hard men and Matthews turns into a pumpkin.
But this year, there’s only one plan they can go with – all Matthews, all the time.
This guy is probably going to score 70 goals. Amazing story. The NHL’s American broadcast partners will love that. They’re going to love it even more if the Leafs end up playing the Bruins in the first round.
Every time Matthews has scored this month, he and Toronto get closer to a singularity of vision. He is the best goal scorer in the game; and the Leafs cannot win unless he scores like that all of the time, not just in February.
It’s only recently that we have we come to expect that the best player in the playoffs is probably not going to be same guy who was the best player in the regular season (a la Marchessault). It used to be that Gretzky or Lemieux won a scoring title, and then they won the Stanley Cup. Unlike modern pros, the greats back then worked a 10-month schedule.
Right now, Matthews is time travelling back to the swinging eighties and nineties via the record books. It won’t mean a whole lot unless – like the all-timers he is being compared with – he can continue that heater into June.