How do you solve a problem like Auston Matthews? If you’re a fan of the woebegone Toronto Maple Leafs, you dream that one day he’ll find a way to lead his team out of the Stanley Cup wilderness. As a Canadian, maybe you tell yourself that, overall, he remains a force for lawful good, despite having captained the United States to Olympic gold at our expense in February.
Oh, I know: it’s not Matthews’s fault that the Leafs traded away Mitch Marner, failed again to solve a perennial goaltending quandary, and ended up as one of the NHL’s worst teams, missing the playoffs and ending the season under a cartoon cloud churning with hammers, lightning bolts, and exclamation marks to illustrate all the bad feeling and recrimination. Nor is the twenty-eight-year-old captain (entirely) responsible for fifty-nine years of Stanley Cup futility. But as someone who’s been described as “the best player in the history of hockey’s most storied franchise,” who has called himself “a...
Stephen Smith is the author of Puckstruck: Distracted, Delighted and Distressed by Canada’s Hockey Obsession. He shoots left.
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