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Is Auston Matthews actually underrated?
As play begins on Tuesday, Auston Matthews of the Toronto Maple Leafs has 32 points in his first 36 NHL games. That includes 20 goals, tying him with Jeff Carter of the Los Angeles Kings for second in the League behind Sidney Crosby’s 26 goals.
Matthews has one more goal and one more point than rookie Patrik Laine of the Winnipeg Jets, who’s played three more games, but at this point the gap feels like it’s in double-digits. That’s what happens when you have the Toronto hype machine powering your Calder candidacy, and when you have moments like his two-goal performance and overtime winner in the 2017 Scotiabank NHL Centennial Classic, held at A Stadium Not Sponsored By Scotiabank on Sunday in front of 40,000 fans.
The acknowledgment of hype isn’t meant to diminish Matthews’s actual accomplishments so far, and what he’s projected to have accomplished by season’s end. As Adam Gretz notes, this is shaping up to be an all-time great goal-scoring debut for Matthews, as he’s projected to score 45 goals this season.
Check out the other 19-year-olds that broke 40 goals (and keep in mind that Sidney Crosby had 39 in his 19-year-old season):
We’re going to guess that Matthews isn’t the next Sylvain Turgeon.
But what is most encouraging for him is the fact that he puts a ton of shots on goal, and that is the absolute biggest factor in being a consistent, top goal scorer. Players that have a huge goal scoring season that is carried by a high shooting percentage and low shot volume tend to regress the next year or cool down as that particular season progresses. The elites do it through shot volume, and right now that is exactly what Matthews is giving the Maple Leafs. After Sunday’s game his 3.70 shot per game average is currently the third best mark in the NHL (minimum 20 games played) behind only San Jose Sharks defenseman Brent Burns and Alex Ovechkin. If you wanted to look for an area where Matthews separates himself from Laine, this would be it (Laine is shooting at 18 percent and averaging a full shot per game less than Matthews).
We all expected Matthews to challenge for the Calder, and many of us expected he’d win it. What we maybe didn’t expect was this level of goal-scoring.
Remember, heading into the NHL Draft, the frequent comparison points for Matthews were John Tavares, Anze Kopitar and Jonathan Toews. None of those guys had ridiculous goal-scoring seasons at 19-year-olds: Toews had 24, Kopitar had 20 and Tavares had 24 (finishing fifth for the Calder).
None of these guys have broken 40 goals in the NHL, and they’re now all between seven and nine years older than Matthews.
So is it possible that with all the hype, all the accolades, all the Savior of the (Centre of the Hockey) Universe talk, that we actually underestimated how good a first overall pick that teams threw their seasons in the toilet in the hopes that they could acquire him?
Well, pretty much, according to our old friend James Mirtle, writing at his new home The Athletic. He notes that Matthews is having “one of the best shot-generating rookies ever, sitting second in shots per 60 (to only Ovechkin) and sixth in shot attempts per 60 (behind a handful of all-stars).”
He also notes that Matthews is starting to be trusted more by coach Mike Babcock insofar as deployment, playing head-to-head with Henrik Zetterberg in the Centennial Classic against the Detroit Red Wings.
But he’s playing 17:46 per night – only David Pastrnak (17:29) and Rickard Rackell (17:19) are playing less among the league’s top 10 goal scorers.
And that’s where Matthews’s true value, true potential, true status is going to be eventually determined, according to Mirtle:
Eventually, Matthews will be the right choice in those minutes, every game. That’s when he’ll tick up into the 20-minutes-per-game range. That’s when he’ll be called on to elevate even more, produce more offence and join the NHL’s scoring leaders.
That might be when we stop comparing him to other very good players that were No. 1 picks like Nathan MacKinnon and Taylor Hall and look further up the ladder. That might be when we start to wonder if he is one of the – if not the – best American players ever. That might be when the hockey world fully realizes what it has in this one-of-a-kind teenager from the Southwestern U.S. It’s something pretty special. So much so that it’s hard to know exactly where this goes.
So is Auston Matthews underrated? As a goal scorer, he probably was. As a franchise, superstar player in this league, however, it might still be difficult to overrate, underrate or simply rate him, to figure out if he’s Kopitar or Stamkos or something even greater.
Based on the early returns, we imagine the Leafs are dreaming big too.
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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
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