Matthews has impact at first day of camp
No. 1 pick centre of attention at his first practice with team
Auston Matthews stepped onto the ice Wednesday for his first training camp practice with the Maple Leafs, and broke a sheet of glass just fooling around with Mitch Marner in a shooting drill after the workout.
The first overall pick, already anointed the biggest reason for belief in a franchise turnaround, didn’t need broken glass to take expectation levels any higher than they already are.
“Lou’s not gonna be happy,” Matthews said, referring to Leafs general manager Lou Lamoriello.
“A lucky day for me there, it was a terrible shot, it wasn’t hard, just hit it in the right place,” Matthews added, smiling, and shrugging off all the attention to his first moments on the ice as a Leaf at the MasterCard Centre.
For all the hype surrounding him, Matthews continued to show the maturity and politeness hockey fans saw over the past 10 days of the World Cup, where he starred on Team North America with Leafs teammate Morgan Rielly, Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel.
The World Cup “was a great challenge for me, and the way I played, going into training camp here, it gave me some confidence,” Matthews said.
That may have been exemplified when the 19-year-old rookie, who hasn’t played an NHL game yet, refers to his Hall of Fame GM as “Lou.”
As for his first official practice, Matthews was met with a media corps so large it had to be broken down into two halves — print and TV — even with the World Cup still ongoing at the Air Canada Centre.
He’s already made a lot of new hockey friends with the Leafs, and is getting to know Toronto through dinners, mall visits and Jays games with his teammates (he’s a Dodgers fan, though, partly because his father, Brian, a former college pitcher, lived in Los Angeles).
The elder Matthews is in Toronto, helping his son get settled while his mother, Ema — who cooks his favourite dish, chicken tortilla soup — and other family members have been by his side through the World Cup.
Now it’s down to the business of becoming a Maple Leaf, but the exact details of that process will be a work in progress.
With Mike Babcock coaching Team Canada at the World Cup, assistant Jim Hiller and others are handling training camp, and they had Matthews (wearing No. 34) out on a line with Leo Komarov and James van Riemsdyk.
“We just threw some lines together for practice today, don’t read too much into that,” Hiller said.
There’s a school of thought the Leafs will shield him a bit from top opposition forwards, who will press him physically and force him to play two-way hockey.
The top-line centre job may be better suited to Nazem Kadri, who has seven seasons in the NHL and was similarly shielded until he learned the two-way game.
“I’d say the 200-foot game,” Kadri said, when asked what will be Matthews’ biggest challenge as an NHL centre.
“Especially being a centre in today’s game. As an offensive player in my first year, my focus was scoring goals, but you have to take over as a 200foot player. You have to control the neutral zone and worry about stop- ping goals too.” Babcock, at the Team Canada workout Wednesday, said Matthews would start the season as the Leafs’ third-line centre, with an open door to work his way up. That could possibly see him skate with Komarov to start.
Matthews turned in a memorable performance at the World Cup, scoring two goals and an assist. He even drilled Leafs teammate Roman Po- lak in a game against Czech Republic, when Polak ran over Eichel in the corner.
None other than Wayne Gretzky said, in reference to Team North America, that he’d love to play with the line of McDavid, Matthews and Eichel, adding “I’d know where to go there.”
Matthews, it seems, is ready for anything.
“Just to be mentioned in the same sentence as him (Gretzky), it’s pretty humbling,” Matthews said. “I expected myself to make an impact (at the World Cup), score some goals, play my game, a 200-foot game.
“I tried to get better every day and that’s what I’ll try to do here. This is an exciting chance for me and I’m anxious to get going and just play hockey. It’s nice to see a new team, a new year, it’s just a great time for myself.”