Expect Auston Matthews To Get Back into Hart Conversation

Auston Matthews won the Hart Trophy last year as the NHL’s best player, while scoring 60 goals, over 100 points and adding in elite defense to be the best all-round player the NHL has seen since Peter Forsberg.

This season, Auston Matthews has fallen off the 60 goal pace, and he isn’t even in the Hart Trophy conversation at all, though the NHL’s MVP Award should go to the best overall player, and the hockey community should be sophisticated enough to give it to someone besides just the highest scorer.

Connor McDavid leads Matthews  by 14 goals and 30 points.

Even Zach Hyman, who the Oilers drastically overpaid, is matching the 20 goals Matthews has this year.

So what gives? 

Auston Matthews Still the Best Player in the NHL

While Connor McDavid is certainly having a great year, he’s also racking up most of points on the power-play and his team is struggling to make the playoffs.  Power-Play points are nice, but they don’t tend to help you win the same way 5v5 do, which makes sense, since roughly 85% of any given game takes place at 5v5.

A lot of what McDavid does, he gives back with bad defense.

At 5v5, Auston Matthews is still having an MVP season.

Only six players’ teams have more goals than the Leafs do with Matthews on the ice this year, and out of those six players, none is even close to the +20 goal differential Matthews has posted.

The Leafs destroy teams when he plays.

Matthews is 2nd in Goals-for Percentage (first among forwards) and 7th by Expected Goals Percentage.

He is 2nd among forwards in scoring-chance percentage.

3rd in 5v5 points per minute (behind Karlsson and Hughes only). (These numbers are minimum 600 5v5 minutes, which is 95 players).  (Stats from naturalstattrick.com).

Matthews is still on pace for 40 goals and 93 points, and most, if not all, of his slightly lower totals can be attributed to his 5v5 individual shooting percentage being one-third of his career average.

Once Matthews experiences positive regression to his norm, he’ll start scoring mulit-goal games again, and there is no reason to think he can’t flirt  with 40 goals in the next 41 games and once again, approach 60.

However, even if he doesn’t, people should realize that he’s playing almost as well last year, but that last year he was getting a tad lucky, and this year a tad unlucky, and that that has combined to drop his totals.  That isn’t the only reason – his numbers are slightly down across the board, however, his previous numbers were bonkers.  His current numbers are pretty bonkers too, in fact, so it’s like going from the White Album to just Abbey Road.

But he is still outscoring McDavid at 5v5 on a per minute basis, and his team is doing way better than McDavid’s at 5v5, so even though Matthews won’t win the MVP, the stats show he’s still the league’s most valuable player.  He likely will score a goal-per-game for the rest of the year and come close to 60 once again.