Toronto Maple Leafs' Auston Matthews is handed his captain's jersey from former captain John Tavares in Toronto, on Aug. 14.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
The numbers don’t lie. From being the first overall pick in the 2016 entry draft to his franchise-record 69 goals last season, Auston Matthews’s tenure in the NHL has often been defined by decisive digits.
And though his anointment Wednesday as the 26th captain in Toronto Maple Leafs history was yet another numerical milestone for the star centre – now the highest-paid player in the NHL at US$13.25-million a season – diehard fans of the Original Six team will likely have another number in mind.
That would be eight, with Matthews now handed the responsibility of forcing his way into one of the most exclusive – and elusive – clubs in Toronto sports by becoming just the eighth man to captain the Maple Leafs to a Stanley Cup championship.
The 26-year-old didn’t shy away from that objective at his official unveiling at Toronto’s Real Sports Bar on Wednesday morning, with the man he will replace, John Tavares, performing the official handoff in bestowing the famous blue-and-white jersey with the C stitched on the chest.
“I look forward to continuing our journey to obviously get to the top of the mountain and win the Stanley Cup and bring it back to Toronto,” Matthews said.
As someone who has been part of the Leafs organization for the past eight years, Matthews will know as well as anyone the kind of hurdles – both numerical and physical – that his team will have to overcome to reach that summit. Whether it’s the solitary playoff series win in the past 20 years, or the now 57-year Stanley Cup drought, which will have reached 58 by next year’s playoffs, that well-trodden path has been littered with heartbreak and failure.
On a day laced with nostalgia, the big screen at Real Sports displayed images from the team’s passing of the captaincy torch from years past. Dave Keon, Darryl Sittler and Mats Sundin all took turns looking down on a video loop, while two more of them – Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour – were present alongside Tavares in the room.
Following in the footsteps of the Swedish Sundin, Matthews, from Scottsdale, Ariz., is just the second non-Canadian captain of the Maple Leafs.
Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving revealed that the initial seeds of change had been sown following conversations among himself, Tavares and team president Brendan Shanahan in the months after the team’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins in May.
“This wasn’t a hard conversation in the sense that John’s a really smart guy and you start just having conversations about the team, the evolution,” Treliving said. “At the end of the day, everybody has got the same goal. The goal is to win and you’re always finding different ways to push that process along.”
Tavares, who joined Matthews and Treliving on the dais at the news conference with his wife and children in attendance, said that being the captain of the Maple Leafs has “meant the world to myself and my family.” However, now 33, Tavares said that he just felt that the time was right for a change.
“Obviously getting the captaincy was an incredible honour. I cherished it, gave it everything I had every single day,” he said. “It made a lot of sense going through it with Tree [Treliving], and our conversations and how I felt, this point in time, it’s a great thing for our team, for Auston, and I think it’s the right thing.”
Shanahan, who captained the Hartford Whalers during his Hall of Fame playing career, knows what it means to captain an NHL team. However, as a three-time Stanley Cup champion himself, he adds that Tavares didn’t come to Toronto as a free agent in the summer of 2018 simply to serve as team captain.
Shanahan, who says he has known the Tavares family since his days playing lacrosse against his uncle as a youth, said he spent time with Tavares over the summer to make sure that this was really something he wanted to do.
“I actually went over to John’s house and sat with him in his back yard and [his wife] Aryne was there and really talked to him about this to gauge his comfortability when this was first being talked about,” he said.
“His role in the dressing room will not change. John will remain the same. I’ve played on lots of great teams that have had sort of multiple captains. One guy wears the C, but there are multiple captains.”
Tavares will still be one of those, but wearing an A as an alternate this season. As far as the other voices in the dressing room, don’t expect Matthews be one of the more vocal ones. The new captain says he will remain much the same as he always has, with the 2022 Hart Trophy winner as NHL most valuable player happy to let his play do the talking.
“You can only control so much,” he said. “For myself, I’m not going to be yelling at people or anything. It’s just continue to evolve as a leader and lead by example.”
Matthews has matured from the player who had embarrassed himself and his team five years ago in his hometown of Scottsdale, when he dropped his pants in front of a female security guard. Shanahan, who as team president had to deal with the fallout from the incident in 2019, which may have played into the decision to pass over Matthews for the captaincy then, pointed to the “growth, maturity on and off the ice” for the centre.
Two other members of the Leafs’ leadership group – defenceman Morgan Rielly and forward Mitch Marner – was also in attendance Wednesday, as was their new head coach, Craig Berube.
Berube didn’t have a direct hand in the decision-making process around the team captaincy, but the Stanley Cup-winning head coach said he was on board with the switch.
Set to enter his first training camp as Leafs head coach next month, Berube said he has had a busy summer making contact with the players and building relationships with them.
As for his new captain, Berube has no doubt that he’s the right guy.
“It’s his work ethic off the ice and how he prepares day in day out,” he said. “He’s at an elite level in that department in my opinion. I’ve witnessed it firsthand, constantly working, trying to get better.”
Those qualities won’t change now that Matthews is wearing a C in his chest. If anything it’s arguably one of his greatest assets, and part of the reason that he has led the NHL in goal scoring in three of the past four seasons.
“I think the intangible that was alluded to today is he has the ability that people want to follow,” Shanahan said. “Not that John didn’t have that, but Auston, we’re now drafting players that had posters of Auston Matthews up on their wall when they were little kids.
“So Auston has the ability, it’s not something that he’s worked on, it’s something that he was born with. People are drawn to him and want to follow him.”