In our last conversation, Mike Bossy saw scoring greatness in Matthews
Only Pavel Bure, along with Matthews, rank among the best goal scorers ever without having a Stanley Cup to their name.
The last time I spoke to Mike Bossy — in the last month of his life two years ago — we talked on the phone for almost an hour, mostly about goal scoring, a lot of the conversation about Auston Matthews.
Bossy said he didn’t know Matthews personally, although he thought they had met somewhere at some league function. But he felt a kinship of sorts to the Maple Leaf, the greatest goal scorer of one generation trying to explain the greatest goal scorer of this generation.
“Watch Matthews,” Bossy said, “he loves to score goals. He has that natural goalscorer’s instinct. He has the shot or, shall I say, shots you need. You can’t always explain scoring and you can’t always define it, it just happens.”
Bossy talked a lot about Matthews’ release — how quickly he shot the puck, how the puck came from different angles and various stick positions, how his delivery made him different than anyone else in the game.
He said that two years ago this month. That was nearing the end of Matthews’ chase for 60. That was the last Bossy saw of him. He passed away at the age of 65 on April 15, 2022.
“It’s hard to put into context what Matthews is doing at this time,” Bossy said on the phone from Montreal. “But he’s doing it. And it’s great for the game, great to see.
“What I like about Matthews now is he’s celebrating his goals more, he seems to be more emotionally involved than in the past.”
And that was two years ago — the celebrations this season have become even larger.
Bossy didn’t get to see the growing history we have been party to this season. Bossy didn’t get to watch Matthews on this breathtaking journey towards 70 goals.
Bossy never did score 70 in a season, but he also never did play an 82-game regular season. The seasons were 80 games long back then. Bossy scored 69 goals in his second NHL season and went on to have four more 60+ goal seasons in the 10 years he played before a debilitating back injury ended his career early.
The all-time statistics list Bossy as the greatest goalsper-game player in NHL history. He is first at .762 a game — a career 61-goal-per-season player — just ahead of Mario Lemieux at .754 and then Matthews at .654.
Then the numbers become open to interpretation.
When Bossy did his scoring, the NHL averaged 3.74 goals per game, per team. In his greatest goal-scoring season, his New York Islanders scored 358 goals goals in 1979, 4.47 goals per game.
Obviously, this is Matthews’ greatest goal-scoring season.
The Maple Leafs have 288 goals heading into Thursday night against New Jersey with four games to play and have averaged 3.69 goals per game this season. Matthews is scoring 23 per cent of the Toronto’s goals. The Leafs may hit 300 goals for the season.
In Bossy’s 69-goal season, he scored 19 per cent of the Islanders goals. At 23 per cent, if Matthews continued on that pace on a team scoring 358 goals in a season, that would give him more than 80 goals.
Which would make a reasonable case for Matthews, at this time, with 3.11 goals being scored per game per team, being the greatest goal scorer of all-time over his career.
Bossy never got the chance to talk about Matthews’ place in history, but he knew he was heading to special circumstances. He knew he was seeing something special.
He would watch him in pre-game warmups, playing pitch and catch on the ice with Mitch Marner, practising one-timers and quickrelease wrist shots and it reminded him of the days he would end practices working with Bryan Trottier, day after day, in the hey day of one of the most pronounced dynasties in hockey history.
Bossy, Trottier and friends won four Stanley Cups in New York. Matthews and Marner, to date, have combined with their teammates to win one playoff round.
That, more than anything else, is the difference between Matthews and Wayne Gretzky, Lemieux, Bossy and the greatest scorers of all time.
Only Pavel Bure, along with Matthews, rank among the best goal scorers ever without having a Stanley Cup to their name.
But Matthews, on the verge of 70 goals, is putting up a number Bossy never mastered and neither did Ovechkin or Bure. Bobby Hull scored 77 goals in the WHA for Winnipeg, but the NHL doesn’t choose to acknowledge those numbers.
Since entering the NHL in 2016, Matthews has scored more goals than any other player. He had 365 heading into Thursday night. Ovechkin ranked behind him with 327 and Leon Draisaitl after that at 326 over that time span.
In Bossy’s 10 NHL seasons, he scored 573 goals, 30 more than Gretzky and 112 goals more than Marcel Dionne.
He looked perfectly natural scoring goals from almost any angle and with almost any shot. He didn’t aim, he told me more than once, he just let it go, quick as he could. The quick release.
“He has that,” Mike Bossy said of Auston Matthews. “It’s his gift.”