Player Discussion Auston Matthews (Captain Edition)

[theTTC]

Bell is out now, Rogers owns the majority. Tanenbaum is rumored to be bought out soon too.

Bell not yet... another month I think.

 

[Gabriel426]

The bigger problem is that JT, Matthews and Marner ALL shrink in big games. “If we had great depth, they could carry our invisible stars in games 5-7” is missing the bigger issue, which is the stars turning invisible in games 5-7.

Watching the careers of guys like McDavid, Crosby, Geno, Ovie, Draisaitl, MacKinnon, Kucherov, Pasta, Marchand, Rantanen, Patty Kane, Perry, Getzlaf, Makar, etc., these guys so often take over games when it matters, and legitimately dominate. Matthews and Marner are consistently completely useless in the crucial games, JT mostly useless, Nylander has some moments but not enough to compensate. That’s why we lose - we’re built around guys who so consistently give you nothing when it matters most.

That’s pretty much the definition of Beta chokers instead of Alpha winners

 

[647Hockey]

The bigger problem is that JT, Matthews and Marner ALL shrink in big games. “If we had great depth, they could carry our invisible stars in games 5-7” is missing the bigger issue, which is the stars turning invisible in games 5-7.

Watching the careers of guys like McDavid, Crosby, Geno, Ovie, Draisaitl, MacKinnon, Kucherov, Pasta, Marchand, Rantanen, Patty Kane, Perry, Getzlaf, Makar, etc., these guys so often take over games when it matters, and legitimately dominate. Matthews and Marner are consistently completely useless in the crucial games, JT mostly useless, Nylander has some moments but not enough to compensate. That’s why we lose - we’re built around guys who so consistently give you nothing when it matters most.

Even guys like Suzuki and Caufield do reasonably well in their limited playoffs on teams that barely make the playoffs. And their playoff years are when they are still young as opposed to being vets.

And those two are small speedy forwards.

So it shows in the playoffs, you dont have to transform into a grizzled vet who can dish out or absorb bone crunching hits.

You just got to do what youre supposed to do which is replicate reg season. There's only one cup winner, but a player just reasonably duplicating what he did in the reg season gets the team halfway to success. What kills a team is easy to understand. The scoring dries up or some bad defence or goaltending. It's not often both teams are firing on all cylinders and each team wins close games 3-2 or 4-3 every match. probably half the series and games are blow outs.

But as you said, the core 4 all fade away. They do well in reg season and even first few games in any series. But once those games 5-7 come around something happens and it all disappears. They even got home ice or leading the series sometimes which should be a boost to close out a series. But some reason still goes down the shitter.

 

[3blizzard4]

I got back problems but the Mitch ain’t one.

 

[Maple Leaf]

Time for this bum to visit the surgeon or a witch doctor, whoever the f*** to fix himself.

He is actually injured

 

[leafs in five]

I wish Mackinnon would have taken over yesterday's game when it mattered

 

[mapleleafs34]

Can't wait to see this guy without Mitch glued to his hip. All the cute shit doesn't work in the playoffs. Auston plays way more direct when he's away from Mitch

 

[JT AM da real deal]

Doubt either of their families were "poor", more likely middle-class. There are no poor kids in hockey in the GTA.

I would say a 1 income $50-60k per family living in Clarington then Markham is POOR but you can define however you'd like

 

[DarkKnight]

I always thought it was his back, but the fact he had it all season and couldn’t seem to shake it, doesn’t bode well for the future. In many ways, I’m starting to think we already reached the peak with this group.

 

[Punch Drunk Loov]

Knies spoke more like a captain than auston

 

[Tie Domi Esquire]

I wish Mackinnon would have taken over yesterday's game when it mattered

I wish Matthews would have taken over any big game he has ever played in his entire life. And no, the All Star game doesn't count.

 

[leafs in five]

I wish Matthews would have taken over any big game he has ever played in his entire life. And no, the All Star game doesn't count.

Same

 

[TMLBlueandWhite]

I would say a 1 income $50-60k per family living in Clarington then Markham is POOR but you can define however you'd like

Considering Marner attended The Hill Academy - an exclusive private school with a focus on athletics that costs upwards of $50,000 or more to attend every year - I think it's safe to say the Marner's weren't struggling to put food on the table while Mitch was growing up.

 

[JT AM da real deal]

View attachment 1041024

Considering Marner attended The Hill Academy - an exclusive private school with a focus on athletics that costs upwards of $50,000 or more to attend every year - I think it's safe to say the Marner's weren't struggling to put food on the table while Mitch was growing up.

So what .. they never paid 1 nickel it was all on scholarship my friend .. in fact Paul do some research first and you will find out he was da teams trainer for 1 year and earned a decent fee on top of that .. Paul did that many times with Kings and Flyers as well .. da reason he went to Kings originally was it was only team that would take him a year up on sponsorship

 

[ACC1224]

So what .. they never paid 1 nickel it was all on scholarship my friend .. in fact Paul do some research first and you will find out he was da teams trainer for 1 year and earned a decent fee on top of that .. Paul did that many times with Kings and Flyers as well .. da reason he went to Kings originally was it was only team that would take him a year up on sponsorship

Those were some good teams. Lots of great players but you could see how special Marner was even then.

 

[JT AM da real deal]

Those were some good teams. Lots of great players but you could see how special Marner was even then.

Folks never liked Paul, even most on his teams quite frankly, but I always found Mitch to be a good spirits and happy on da bench .. he had some issues in his stride which i hoped he'd correct which i still believe would have helped him as he grew but again Paul made da call on where Mitch went for skating advice .. and look bottom line his kid made a boatload of $$$ in hockey and very very very few do .. i wish him nothing but da best .. i was one of very very very few who supported Mitch on NT54 where you may know he was hated as a kid .. lots of jealous folks who only a tiny fraction of Mitch's talent .. when games got down to only da best of da best kids he always struggled to win although he gave it his all

 

[Stephen]

Can't wait to see this guy without Mitch glued to his hip. All the cute shit doesn't work in the playoffs. Auston plays way more direct when he's away from Mitch

My fear is he doesn’t like playing a hard straight line game and that’s why he clings to Mitch and wants to be a glorified Steven Stamkos.

 

[Stephen]

I would say a 1 income $50-60k per family living in Clarington then Markham is POOR but you can define however you'd like

Sometimes, (and by that I mean all the time) I find it disconcertingly annoying that we know so much about Marner and all the hard knocks he ever took in his life.

The whole tension is he got paid a lot of money and the championship output was not worth the price paid. That’s it.

Do we really need every biographical detail to justify why he asked for what he did? Does the public know or care this much about any other player in the game. There’s more baggage here than the arrivals terminal at Pearson.

 

[JT AM da real deal]

Sometimes, (and by that I mean all the time) I find it disconcertingly annoying that we know so much about Marner and all the hard knocks he ever took in his life.

The whole tension is he got paid a lot of money and the championship output was not worth the price paid. That’s it.

Do we really need every biographical detail to justify why he asked for what he did? Does the public know or care this much about any other player in the game. There’s more baggage here than the arrivals terminal at Pearson.

Bottom line you are right .. i was just correcting folks who think he had an easy privileged upbringing

 

[TMLBlueandWhite]

So what .. they never paid 1 nickel it was all on scholarship my friend .. in fact Paul do some research first and you will find out he was da teams trainer for 1 year and earned a decent fee on top of that .. Paul did that many times with Kings and Flyers as well .. da reason he went to Kings originally was it was only team that would take him a year up on sponsorship

Old man Marner admits it cost him $15,000 - $18,000 a year in this video here.

But yeah it wouldn't surprise me to find out Mitch got extra special privileges as a kid because his daddy pulled some strings.

 

[DarkKnight]

Keep seeing this clip, to me it demonstrates he's a weak leader, doesn't look comfortable at all. Comes off as a candy ass pretender to me, rather than a true leader, but....

 

[NVious]

On the topic of this and Toronto media, Dreger (one of the biggest talking heads in Toronto) was just saying the other day how Matthews is a stud and you don't even THINK about moving him. When these media heads become friends with the guys, they carry water for them, a good chunk of them are totally corrupted.

Everything about Matthews is off putting:
6th greatest gpg in the season to 84th in the playoffs
Throwing his teammates under the bus while he himself hogs up cap space
Extremely greedy, not only looking for max dollar, but minimum term to maximize dollars in the future
Passionless robot like Tavares
Injury prone and unwilling to tell the fans exactly what happens

Yet talking heads like Dreger only want you to focus on his gpg in the season and ignore everything else. The Leafs 100000% should explore moving Matthews if somebody wants to give you good or even great value.

It's like saying we can't move Filip Forsberg (who is ahead of Matthews in playoff gpg) at 13.5 mill because hes too much of a stud.....

 

[NVious]

Can't wait to see this guy without Mitch glued to his hip. All the cute shit doesn't work in the playoffs. Auston plays way more direct when he's away from Mitch

Why did he and Auston demand to be together? Anybody with brains should know if the game wasn't going well the first thing to do was break them up, but we never did that in the playoffs.

Again, Auston is at least 50% if not more of the problem there. If he's the leader and knows this himself, why doesn't he say anything to Craig?

 

[Apotheosis]

Haven't really kept up with hockey much since last year since I lost interest in the perennial crap the Leafs pull and it seems like nothing has changed. I know everyone is also piling it on Marner (rightfully so) but I think Matthews is to be blamed even more so. He's not that good, sorry not sorry. One dimensional goal scorer who doesn't even score in the playoffs and gets paid to do so while only playing defence instead. It's quite sad. The rebuild was an abject failure.

 

[Roo]

Keep seeing this clip, to me it demonstrates he's a weak leader, doesn't look comfortable at all. Comes off as a candy ass pretender to me, rather than a true leader, but....

I don’t think the video tells us anything really. You don’t need to have a powerful voice to lead. Frankly, I thought the McDavid video of him yelling at his team was hilarious. Some high pitched tones there.

Leading by example is what matters. In that area, it is unclear how he is doing. He hasn’t exactly been taking over games this season, but we don’t know how his injury has affected him. Bérubé praises him for his 200ft game, and that was pretty clear to see this season. I just don’t think, given everything that happened, that we saw a player that was anywhere like last season. Just got to hope that a few months of rest gets him back to 100%.