SIMMONS: Leafs captain Auston Matthews needs to summon his inner Connor McDavid
Toronto's top dog needs to step up his game when it matters the most, like other fellow stars have done across the NHL.
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For all he has done as a Maple Leaf and all that he has accomplished, there is no single playoff moment that defines Auston Matthews.
There is no Doug Gilmour post-to-post wrap-around goal. There is no leap like Lanny McDonald did when he scored to eliminate the great Islanders in overtime. Or anything to resemble Darryl Sittler’s five-goal game against the hated Philadelphia Flyers.
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SIMMONS: Leafs captain Auston Matthews needs to summon his inner Connor McDavid Back to video
All that can change on Tuesday night in a second clinching opportunity game in the Battle of Ontario. A change that could buy him some space alongside the greats of years gone by who never had his goal-scoring totals.
A 60-goal season doesn’t mean a whole lot right now when Matthews has one goal in four games against the Ottawa Senators and he hit the post on a power-play shot in overtime Saturday night that could have won the Maple Leafs this first-round series.
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An amazing 69-goal season, as impossible as it still seems, doesn’t mean a whole lot right now with Matthews needing to be great at the largest team moment of his professional career.
It’s hard to believe this is Season 9 for Matthews in Toronto and, for all the direct deposits he has received and all that has been banked along the way, his talent has yet to pay off when it matters most.
There’s no real secret to winning in the National Hockey League when you have great players at the top of your lineup. All you’ve had to do is watch Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl the past few nights to understand. They grab games, turn it into theirs, alter the results and play at a level they’ve never played at often.
All you had to do was see McDavid’s face in the third period and the overtime against Los Angeles on Sunday night to comprehend how much it means to him to directly impact the outcome for the Edmonton Oilers.
Against the second-hardest team to score against in the NHL, McDavid has nine points in four games, same number as Draisaitl.
On Saturday night in Ottawa, with the Leafs in position to move on to the second round of the playoffs, Matthews had no goals, no assists.
This is not unfamiliar territory for him. In Game 7 against Boston last year, he had an assist, but no goals. In the clinching Game 5 against Florida the year before, no points. Only once in 16 potential clinching games over the past eight seasons has Matthews managed more than a point.
And that happened just once against Columbus, with one goal and two assists in Game 4 with the Leafs up 2-1 in a best-of-five series. A preliminary round in what wasn’t even called playoffs in 2020.
The Maple Leafs didn’t put the ‘C’ on Matthews’ jersey this season as a gesture. They did it because they wanted change, they wanted to turn the team over to him and the move was more than symbolic.
The Leafs didn’t make Matthews the highest-paid player in hockey because they like his style and his television commercials. They did it because they believe him to be one of the true greats of the NHL.
And this is when the true greats come out to play.
Nathan MacKinnon, more setup man than goal scorer, has four goals this year in four playoff games in Colorado.
Nikita Kucherov, the best setup man in hockey, needed to stand out when Tampa Bay lost two straight games to Florida. In Game 3, Kucherov had three assists. That’s the kind of thing he does.
The first time the Lightning won the Cup with Jon Cooper coaching, Kucherov had a five-point game, a four-point game, a three-point, and 10 multi-point games all in four playoff rounds.
There is nothing particularly wrong with the way Matthews has played against the Senators, centring the Leafs’ best line with Mitch Marner and Matthew Knies alongside him. But there has been nothing particularly breathtaking or series-changing about his play, either.
He hasn’t done the McDavid ‘I’m taking this over’ kind of thing. He hasn’t done the MacKinnon ‘they can’t stop me, just try’ kind of thing. He hasn’t done the subtle Kucherov kind of thing.
Individual dominance is not necessarily part of Matthews overall game — especially now that he has played most of this season with something wrong and he rested Monday for practice because he had a long night in Game 4 on Saturday.
The only goal he’s scored in the series has come off a once-in-a-lifetime kind of pass from Marner. He hit Marner with a long near-perfect touchdown pass earlier in the series. There have been those kind of singular moments, just not enough of them so we know that the highest-paid player in hockey is earning his keep.
The past 10 playoff-clinching games the Leafs have played in, Matthews has scored three goals and notched four assists. That’s a 24-goal pace over an 82-game schedule. He scores at 52-goal place, career, over each regular season. Playoff-wise, the numbers haven’t been good enough.
It’s no secret how much difficulty the Leafs have had in winning playoff series in the Matthews Era. Part of the reason, over the years, is that he hasn’t grabbed the ball and run with it.
The way McDavid and Draisaitl did on Sunday night.
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