Auston Matthews continued his torrid goal-scoring campaign against the Toronto Maple Leafs’ final game against the New Jersey Devils game this season, potting his 67th of the season off a feed from Max Domi, or “new Mitch”, if you will.
The goal was the 366th of his career in his 559th all-time game, passing Dave Keon and putting him into third on the Leafs’ all-time goal-scoring list. Simply put, it’s an incredible accomplishment for a 26-year-old player to have on his resume, and it’s even more incredible when you consider the following two factors. One, it’s possible he could be the Leafs’ all-time leading scorer by the time he turns 27, and if not, then for sure by the time he’s 28. Two, he’s doing this for a franchise that’s been around for 107 years.
AM67 pic.twitter.com/mfOHDhkjug
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) April 11, 2024
It seems like, these days, with every goal of his comes a milestone or some sort of record. On Tuesday night, also against the Devils, his 66th gave him the highest single-season total among active players, surpassing Alex Ovechkin’s 65 goals for the Washington Capitals in 2007-08. Not to take anything away from Ovechkin, seeing that it was harder to score goals 16 years ago than it is now, yet another impressive part of Matthews’ case is that he’s being talked about in the Selke Trophy conversation in addition to this. When the Leafs drafted him in 2016, you could sense that he was going to be the #1 centre for this team for a long time but to have him scoring goals at such an astronomical pace while providing elite defence at the same time has to be light years beyond what they were expecting of him.
Matthews has three more games to score three more goals and reach the 70 mark for the first time since Alexander Mogilny and Teemu Selanne in 1992-93, a feat that seems more and more attainable with every game that passes. And the current game isn’t even over yet!
