MATTHEWS, GQ
There’s the on-ice look of Auston Matthews: a white or blue jersey with the Toronto Maple Leafs logo front and centre. When he scores, he drops down to a knee and pumps a fist, or he turns to the glass with arms raised, wagging gloved fingers as if to ask the crowd for some love, a request that’s happily obliged.
But it’s Matthews’s off-ice moves that have garnered just as much attention recently. He’s staring intently at the camera while wearing a Dolce & Gabbana suit or a Givenchy sweater or a very red, very large overcoat by Maison Margiela whose price is only available upon request.
The first two weeks of the NHL season have belonged to Matthews, who has been everywhere from the pages of GQ to the cover of Sharp Magazine to filling up NHL highlight reels as he’s scored 10 goals in the Maple Leafs’ first seven games.
In hockey-mad Toronto for the past two years, Matthews was constantly in the spotlight for what he could do on the ice — he’s scored 84 goals since the start of the 2016-17 season, second to only Washington’s Alex Ovechkin (86) — but he kept a low profile off it. Until now.
“Just being more comfortable,” Matthews said of the change.
It helps that Matthews got a green light of sorts from new Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas, who said at a season-opening news conference that he wants “players to be at their best, whatever their individual best may be. Part of that is letting them really express themselves in a professional manner and to try to be themselves the best they can.”
It’s a change from Dubas’s predecessor, the old-school Lou Lamoriello, and his rules about players maintaining clean-shaven faces and not allowing rookies to do in-game interviews. The more attention to the team (and less for the individual), the better.
But the regime change isn’t why Matthews is suddenly leaning into his celebrity — though it probably didn’t hurt. He’s organically become the face of a wave of young NHL talent that is making bolder, more creative choices on the ice, and those players are now starting to challenge a culture that’s suppressed that sort of flash outside of the rink.
While professional basketball and football players often use the walk into an arena or a postgame news conference as a personal fashion show, NHL players tend to stick to traditional suits with ties, and the ones who stray too far from that can be cast as drawing
too much attention to themselves — a hockey no-no.
Or at least it used to be.
“I think at some point, you’ve just got to do what makes you happy and put yourself out there and have fun,” Matthews said. “Not really care what other people think.”
Matthews has always been one to forge his own path. He grew up in Arizona — not exactly a hockey hotbed — and has a unique-to-hockey heritage with a Mexican mother. And after he dominated in the U.S. national team development program, he took an unconventional route by choosing to play professionally in Switzerland at 17 rather than a year of college hockey or with a Canadian major junior team.
It was that year in Zurich, when he was surrounded by European style, that stoked his passion for fashion.
Judd Moldaver, Matthews’ agent and senior vice-president of hockey at Wasserman Media Group, didn’t “want to put too much on the plate too quickly” for him. But now that the 21-year-old is more settled in his stillyoung NHL career, Moldaver has started to curate Matthews’s off-ice opportunities according to his interests.
For both magazine shoots, Wasserman gave some direction about the brands Matthews typically gravitates to, and for the Sharp spread in particular, Matthews’s team collaborated with Kesha McLeod, the stylist for Serena Williams and James Harden, about the outfits he’d model.
“I think he went into it just knowing he was going to have fun and it was going to be interesting, and I don’t think he really thought about what the reactions would be,” Moldaver said. “You just assume that there are going to be people that like it, people who have a different opinion and everything in between. But the cool thing is that this is authentic to him . ...
“We’re open for business, and we’ve been open for business on his behalf. It’s just a matter of the right brands, the right associations, and Auston’s primary focus is to win hockey games and be the best teammate.”
The best young American in hockey, it’s good for the sport if Matthews is recognizable outside out of uniform. Chicago’s Patrick Kane became the first American to win the Hart Trophy, the NHL’s MVP award, in 2016, and Matthews’s hot start to the season has made him an early contender for hardware.
He’s also nearing the end of his entry-level contract and could receive something in the neighbourhood of the eight-year, US$100million extension Edmonton Oilers centre Connor McDavid signed a year ago.
Thanks to a loaded forward corps that includes Matthews and fellow centre John Tavares, a splash free-agent acquisition, the Maple Leafs have Stanley Cup expectations. In summary: the spotlight is only getting brighter.
The day before Toronto’s much-hyped game against the defending champion Capitals, Matthews and some teammates rode electric scooters around Washington and went to see a movie. He read an article about Capitals centre Evgeny Kuznetsov, who said he doesn’t “give (an expletive)” about winning the Hart Trophy because he just wants to have fun. Something about the sentiment resonated with Matthews and the brand he’s building for himself.
“I loved it,” Matthews said. “I think a lot of us, especially us young guys, stray away from that, having fun. And we’re all still kids. That’s why we’ve played the game for as long as we have and why the NHL is still a goal for us to accomplish as young kids — because of how much fun we’re having on the ice.”
He’s proving you can have fun off the ice, too.