Toronto media hyping Matthews for Calder?

Plenty of factors will determine top NHL rookie

Tin Toronto he question did not make mention of Auston Matthews, Patrik Laine or the whole Calder Trophy debate. There was nothing said about whether playing in Toronto rather than Winnipeg helped or hurt a player’s popularity. The words “Eastern Conference bias” were not uttered at any point.

Leafs’ head coach Mike Babcock was simply asked if he felt any animosity from his coaching fraternity for being in the quote-unquote “centre of the hockey universe.”

“I can’t think of one thing that would be bad about playing in Toronto except if the team’s bad,” said Babcock. “I guess if you want to play where they don’t know about hockey, then go and play somewhere else. But to me, if you want to play in the best hockey market in the world, this is where you want to be. I think it’s fantastic.”

Toronto may or may not be the best hockey market in the world, but it’s certainly the biggest. There’s strength in numbers, with more reporters covering the sport here than in any other place in the NHL. Because of that, the daily plight of the team’s seventh defenceman often receives more attention than star forwards in some other markets.

So when there is a genuinely good player to talk about such as Matthews or Mitch Marner or William Nylander, the rest of the world hears about them. Ad nauseam. But does that help Matthews’ chances of beating Laine for the Calder Trophy? Or might it actually hurt him?

“I am a little sick of hearing about him,” Postmedia hockey reporter Jim Matheson, who covers the Edmonton Oilers, said in an email.

“But I think people in Toronto are trying too hard to inform us how special he is.”

“Look, you can’t escape the Toronto hype machine,” said Ottawa-based Postmedia hockey columnist Bruce Garrioch in a direct message on Twitter.

“That’s just the reality of Matthews being in a big market. But the amount of press a guy gets won’t have any weight in how I fill out the ballot box.”

“I do think Toronto writers have gone completely nuts, but I don’t really blame them, given what they’ve had to watch the last decade,” said Jason Brough, a Vancouver-based writer for NBC’s ProHockey Talk. “At any rate, it won’t affect my vote one way or the other. Laine gets plenty of attention himself.”

When comparing Matthews to Laine, there are a number of things to consider.