All the talk is about finding a centre. As it should be with the Maple Leafs, who absolutely need a third-line centreman.
But what they need as much, if not more, is their first-line centre — their captain, their apparent leader, now the second-leading goal scorer in franchise history — living up to the expectations that made him the highest-paid player in hockey.
Auston Matthews has not had a very healthy season in his first year as captain of the Maple Leafs and that has been a problem, even as the team finds itself in a tight race atop the Atlantic Division.
But what nobody cares to talk about much — management doesn’t mention it, coach Craig Berube gets defensive when talking about his captain — is that the dominant Matthews, the player who separated himself from the scoring pack in the NHL, hasn’t been around much this season.
And certainly hasn’t been around lately.
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The NHL trade deadline is Friday. There is tremendous pressure on general manager Brad Treliving to take a good team and make it better, even with next to nothing of value to trade in return and almost no salary cap space to enable him.
Treliving needs to pull a rabbit or two from his hat. He doesn’t have the roster flexibility to do what GM Bill Zito did in Florida the other day, adding Seth Jones to essentially replace Brandon Montour from last year’s Stanley Cup championship team.
Zito has won a Cup in Florida and managed to maintain a salary balance that allowed him to pick up Jones. General manager Julien BriseBois in Tampa Bay, with two Stanley Cups to his name, has another contending team, along with coach Jon Cooper, and some room to add depth scoring to his roster in the days to come.
Both the Panthers and the Lightning have won with their great players being great players.
Aleksander Barkov was the best Florida player outside of goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky in last year’s playoffs. When Tampa won its championships, Nikita Kucherov, new captain Victor Hedman and goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy played brilliantly when it mattered most.
The Leafs have never gotten that from Matthews at playoff time or from his linemate Mitch Marner, who is having his best season as a Leaf this year. Marner is in a contract year and he’s going to get paid next year, no matter where he plays.
But at the end of the day, the Leafs won’t win anything without Matthews being more than great. You need your Barkovs to be Barkovs and your Kucherovs to be Kucherovs in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The Leafs need Matthews to start playing the way only he can play. He is a difference-maker with an unstoppable style when he’s at his best.
Matthews has missed 15 games this season and probably played in some games he shouldn’t have played in, but the numbers he has put up are decent for other players.
Not decent for a guy you’ve built everything around.
Matthews has 22 goals, which would have him scoring 39 goals over an entire 82-game season. That’s 30 goals fewer than he scored last year. That’s scoring at a pace of 14 goals fewer than he has in his breathtaking career. That’s one less than his rookie season.
Coming into this season, over his first eight years, Matthews has scored at a 54-goal pace on a per-season basis. That’s a higher pace than Alexander Ovechkin, who will soon be the highest scorer in hockey history.
When the Leafs decided to make Matthews the highest-paid player in NHL history and then follow that in the summer by transferring the captaincy from John Tavares to the American, they did so for many reasons. But they truly believed there was value in the contract and they were rewarding him for that.
This season of individuals has been about three scorers in the NHL, really. It has been about Nathan MacKinnon in Colorado, Leon Draisaitl in Edmonton and Kucherov all scoring at a pace somewhere between 122 points and 125 points on the season.
Colorado has won a Cup. Edmonton has played for a Cup. Tampa Bay has won twice with Kucherov, scoring 66 post-season points over two playoff seasons.
In his first eight years with the Leafs, all of them in the playoffs, Matthews has just 48 playoff points. He has made the second round of the playoffs once. He has never been overwhelming at playoff time.
In his past 12 games with the Leafs — 15 if you count his tournament games for Team USA — Matthews has scored two goals, one of them an empty-netter. He has 14 points in those 12 games, 10 of them assists, which is almost the opposite of how he has played his entire career.
It’s entirely possible that this is Matthews’ Steve Yzerman-conversion season — Scotty Bowman turned Yzerman from high scorer to all-around player in Detroit, is Berube doing the same with Matthews? — but he already was a 200-foot player while he was scoring in the 60s.
On Monday night against the young and vulnerable San Jose Sharks, Matthews had an entire third period, plus an overtime on the power play, and couldn’t find a way to win the game.
At the same time in Florida, with the Panthers playing the red-hot Lightning, Barkov scored both goals in a 2-1 win.
The Leafs can pick up Brayden Schenn or Scott Laughton or Yanni Gourde or somebody else to play centre or the wing for the last quarter of the season and into the playoffs, but it won’t matter if Matthews doesn’t play better.
It starts with Matthews, the captain. This year and every year.
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