Toronto Maple Leafs: Look For Auston Matthews to Score 70+

The Toronto Maple Leafs have made a series of horrible decisions this summer, but that likely won’t be reflected on the ice.

The thing is, the NHL is a star-driven league, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are a team of stars.

Two years ago, Auston Matthews won the Hart Trophy and led the league with 60 goals.

Last year, playing through multiple injuries, he scored “just” 40 times.

This year, if healthy, and there is no reason to expect otherwise, Matthews will easily get back to being the player he was, and that changes everything.

Despite a horrible off-season, the Leafs have Matthews and Marner, and that’s all that really matters.

Toronto Maple Leafs: Look For Auston Matthews to Score 70+

Matthews gets a bad rap as a playoff failure.   It’s just how things have worked out in the aggregate, but if you take a fine-tooth comb to each year of his career, you’ll see a player that mostly just got unlucky when it counted.

If you have five minutes, go find the long-form highlights from any game in the Florida series this past spring and just count the amount of times Matthews should have scored, but was brutally robbed by Sergei Bobrovsky or a goalpost.

Eventually, the timing is going to work and he’s going to slice through the NHL Playoffs like a hot knife through butter.  This could be that year, I mean, why not?

The crazy thing about Matthews is that he’s actually pretty underrated. Statistically, given the importance of defense and 5v5 play you can make a very good argument that he’s the best player alive.

Even if you insist on saying it’s Connor McDavid, there isn’t anyone close to usurping Matthews from the #2 spot. Maybe Connor Bedard one day, but no one currently alive is even close to him, and this includes MacKinnon, Marner and Karpizov.

When people try to predict how Matthews will do in the future, they tend to look at his 60 goal season as a high point, and forget that he actually started that year unable to shoot the puck very well after an off-season surgery.

Matthews actually scored 50 goals in 50 games, and there is no reason to think he can’t get back to scoring about a goal per game.   Especially if the Leafs add a nice power-forward to his line like Matthew Knies to create a bit more room for him.

To do it, he’ll have to be at full health for the full season, and he’ll have to get a bit lucky in terms of shooting-percentage, but he’s the best goal scorer in the world and there’s no reason he can’t hit 70.

The most anyone has scored since the 90s is Ovechkin in 2008  when he had 65. Last year,  McDavid scored 64  and Pastrnak scored 61 times.

I would expect Auston Matthews to top both of them this year, and if he wants to enter the all-time top ten, he’ll need 72.