SIMMONS: For Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and others, 4 Nations final is the game of their lives
Auston Matthews has money and prestige and style and personality, but what he doesn’t have is a signature victory.
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The biggest win in Auston Matthews’ hockey life has yet to happen.
He has money and prestige, style and personality, but what he doesn’t have is a signature victory, the kind most athletes dream about, talk about the rest of their lives.
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SIMMONS: For Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and others, 4 Nations final is the game of their lives Back to video
He has played in four Stanley Cup playoff Game 7s — the games we played on the driveway as kids and in our heads at night — and he has lost all four of them.
That signature win for him may come Thursday night in Boston, when he captains Team USA against Canada and plays against Mitch Marner, his Toronto linemate and close friend.
This is the precursor to next February’s Olympic Games in Italy but it’s all that matters right now. This is the chance to establish a favourite one year in advance. This is the chance for some players to secure spots on the Olympic team, though Matthews isn’t one of those players.
His name is already pencilled in for 2026. No matters what happens Thursday night at the TD Garden, a place where Matthews has known unfortunate defeat before.
Even though he’s still a kid, really this is his ninth National Hockey League season, the same number for Marner. On Thursday, they will play against each other and on Saturday they will likely be back on the same line when the Leafs resume play following the 4 Nations Face-off break. But life will be different after that, no matter what.
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One of them will be a 4 Nations champion and one will not. One will hold that bragging right, as quiet as it may be, over the other for at least the next 12 months. If the hockey played the past week is anything close to what we might see in Milano next year, then let’s get to the Olympics now. The wait is already too long.
People forget that the 2014 best-on-best Olympics in Sochi was a rather big bore. Team Canada played clinical, near-perfect hockey. Nobody came close to them. The tournament lacked excitement, a Russian presence in Russia and drama of any real kind.
The drama of this past week has been extreme in the short term. Sweden never lost a game in regulation time and still found itself eliminated. Finland won once in overtime and almost pushed another game that way. The talent level at the top of the world may be the greatest and most spread out its ever been.
But first, there is a championship game to get to Thursday night. A big title from a small tournament. The title that comes before Milano. And from this tiny event comes the biggest game of so many players lives.
Matthews hasn’t won much in his professional career and neither has Marner.
The great Connor McDavid has yet to win the Stanley Cup with the Edmonton Oilers but he did get to Game 7 of the final last June. He got there and didn’t win. There is a bitterness that goes with that that may never go away. No matter how many championships he may win in the future, those close losses are so hard to deal with.
McDavid has played in only three Game 7s for the Oilers. They beat Vancouver last year to advance to the conference final. They lost Game 7 in the heat of Florida, coming back from being down three games, when everything seemed to be going their way.
McDavid’s record in Game 7s is just 2-1 He hasn’t played a lot of win and you’re in games in his 10-year career. And because of NHL and Players Association ignorance prior to the hiring of Marty Walsh as executive director, there was no international hockey for NHL players from 2016 to now.
There has been no Team Canada jersey for McDavid to wear, or Nathan MacKinnon to wear and for so many of the members of Jon Cooper’s team in Boston, this is their first real Canadian best-on-best experience — with Canada and the U.S. now the hockey countries that matter most — as genuine superstars of the sport.
For many, for McDavid, Matthews, Marner, this is the game of their lives. For right now.
Many hockey people put stock in winning Stanley Cups. How many Cup-winners do you have on your team? Team Canada is more decorated than Team USA. And that’s not just because they have Sidney Crosby, Drew Doughty and five Cups between them.
The goalies, Jordan Binnington and Adin Hill have both won Stanley Cups. Cale Makar and Devon Toews won together in Colorado and Colton Parayko won with Binnington in St. Louis.
In total, there are 19 Stanley Cup rings spread among the 23 players on Team Canada.
There are just three on Team USA — Jack Eichel from Vegas, Jake Guentzel from his time in Pittsburgh and the firecracker, Matthew Tkachuk, from last season’s Florida Panthers. As fresh as that championship may be, Tkachuk is calling Thursday’s game the biggest of his life.
The stakes in hockey forever change when you’re wearing your country’s colours. This matters today, tomorrow and, for some players, the rest of their lives.
The Olympics are a year from now. For Team Canada and Team USA, the Olympics really begin on Thursday night.
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