It’s often difficult to assess a real sense of urgency at this early stage of the season, but Auston Matthews and Brad Marchand are both tasked with delivering authoritative responses after a series of poor performances drew national attention. Mistakes will always get magnified in Original Six markets, to be sure, but both the Maple Leafs and Bruins’ captains have been tasked with course correction during Saturday night’s marquee, only that the parameters look different for both players.
We’ll start with Matthews. Toronto generated stellar results during its first six games, a microcosm of the first line overall, which dominated the shot differential even in losses. The entire Maple Leafs’ team submitted arguably their worst regular season performance of the Matthews era on Tuesday night against the Columbus Blue Jackets, a result that compounded during Thursday’s 5-1 to the St. Louis Blues. Matthews played an atypically poor game — he and Mitch Marner were Toronto’s worst players during Thursday’s loss, and his two major mistakes were easily identified: he accidentally screened Joseph Woll during St. Louis’ first goal, then he fumbled a handoff from Woll, skating the puck into the corner, which led to a lost battle and a 3-1 lead for the opponent.
Matthews, to his credit, took accountability for his dip in form during his media availabilities on Thursday and Friday.
“Light on pucks, losing battles, opened up the net front tonight. It’s pretty simple,” he said. “Just a bad game all around. It starts with me. But yeah, there’s a number of things we obviously didn’t do good tonight.”
Matthews has largely functioned like the superstar that he is throughout the opening month of the season. He’s tied for first league-wide with 39 shots in all situations — New Jersey’s Jack Hughes and Dougie Hamilton have played in three more games. It hasn’t always led to greater production, as Matthews has recorded three goals and five points through eight games. A basic understanding of positive regression, along with the more simple idea that goals will eventually rain down for a player of his calibre, should make it easier to stomach a set of bad games from Toronto’s captain.
Toronto can’t afford the free fall that comes with a three-game losing streak, and really, the good work displayed through the opening six games will be lost to history, especially in a 24-hour news cycle, one of the more unfortunate tenets of professional sports in 2024, if the Maple Leafs are defeated Saturday night. At the time of this filing, both the Maple Leafs and Bruins would miss the playoffs if they were held today — a misleading stat in some ways due to the variance in games played, but the point remains that a sense of urgency has been renewed after the mid-week descent.
“We see these guys a lot we’ve seen them a lot during our time here,” Matthews said Friday. It’s always a physical, emotional game out there, especially in Boston. We know we need to have a good response and have a good start tomorrow and make sure that everybody’s on the same page and just ready to compete and work and get back to what made guys successful through the previous six games.”
Toronto’s first line has been on the ice for six goals against the past two games, and there’s no reason to use underlying stats to deceive anyone into thinking there’s a silver lining to be found. Matthews was ripped into by Berube on the bench following his key mistake during the third goal, while the team’s power play continues to be a sore spot, converting on just 3-of-28 chances thus far.
“It’s just accountability to everybody, you know, that’s all it is,” Berube said of Matthews on Friday. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just me being a coach and doing what I think is right at the time.”
Matthews is one of the NHL’s brightest stars, and while the two-game slide could be pinned on everyone throughout the lineup (you could make cases for Matthew Knies and Oliver Ekman-Larsson to be exempt, it would be pedantic), and it starts with Toronto’s best player, against a team that eliminated them in excruciating fashion last year.
The parameters are different for Marchand. For the better part of three seasons, analysts have predicted the Bruins’ downfall, only for the club to remain as a perpetual Cup contender. Perhaps the wheels are beginning to fall off — again, perhaps a function of October Overreaction — but the Bruins are 3-4-1 with a minus-six goal differential, and Marchand’s carelessness with the puck led to a critical mistake against the Utah Hockey Club, ending in a 2-1 loss Saturday.
Bruins head coach Jim Montgomery called Marchand out on the bench, and the 36-year-old took the criticism in stride. He’s won at every level of his career, so the parameters are slightly different, but for Marchand, it’s an individual call to action as well. Unlike Matthews, he hasn’t functioned anywhere near a superstar level, with four assists through eight games, still in search of his first goal, while ranking 96th league-wide in shots in all situations. If the Bruins were overly reliant on David Pastrnak last year, this dynamic has magnified again.
🎥 Brad Marchand on tonight’s #NHLBruins matchup against Dallas: “We have a chance tonight to bounce back and start understanding the way we need to play to be better. We looked at some video today to see some areas we can improve upon. It’s an opportunity to work at that.” pic.twitter.com/FJgl9jn2TO
— Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) October 24, 2024
“A lot of the mistakes that we’re making and the reasons that we feel we’re losing is because of our lack of respect for the game and consistency in details,” Marchand said Friday. “Those are things you can fix. When you have a lack of effort and guys just not caring, that’s a whole different issue and that’s not what we have.”
This essay isn’t necessarily to antagonize Marchand. He submitted a tour-de-force performance against the Maple Leafs in Game 3 and was dominant through their first-round matchup. Toronto is keenly aware of what Marchand can do at his best, but he hasn’t been anywhere close to the form he displayed throughout last season, where he displayed an elite penchant for drawing penalties as well.
“We’re fine,” Bruins defenceman Charlie McAvoy said Friday via NHL.com’s Amalie Benjamin. “We’re not going to panic. It’s game eight. Hopefully, we’ve got a lot of games left, and we’ll keep getting better.”
McAvoy is right. We’re entering game nine of the season for the Maple Leafs and Bruins, and it can be difficult to conjure up ‘the sky is falling’ takes to fill up dead air. The parameters are different for Matthews and Marchand in their response games, and it’ll change the pillars of the early season to date as both teams look to snap out of the sub-par form displayed this past week.
PRESENTED BY GREAT CLIPS
Great Clips, the world’s largest hair salon brand, is a 100% franchised company with more than 150 hair salons across Canada that are owned and operated by Canadians. Great Clips prides itself on making it easy for customers to get a great haircut at a great price at a time and place that’s convenient for them. They’ve also made it easy for customers to make Great Clips their hair salon of choice with services like Online Check-In and Clip Notes®. From bobs and layers to kids’ haircuts, bald fades and more, Great Clips has a look that’s great for you.
