Matthews will get hero’s welcome in a city starved for success
There are prospects all through the system now, at varying degrees of development: There is the makings of something.
And now, a crown jewel: a big centre who can handle the puck and eat tough minutes and who excelled against men as an 18-yearold. Auston Matthews, welcome to Toronto.
“My heart was beating when I was walking up there,” Matthews said. “Very nerve-wracking.”
“I remember somebody at the end-of-season press conference last year, after I said we’re going to do this the right way, asking, ‘Well what if you win the draft lottery?’ ” Leafs president Brendan Shanahan said. “Well, then it’s going to speed up. So the answer is it’s still a team game that requires a solid team. Acquiring special players helps.”
Pressure. A No. 1 pick guarantees nothing, of course. Go back to Sundin in 1989, and four No. 1 picks have played central roles in winning Stanley Cups with the team that drafted them: Vincent Lecavalier, Marc-André Fleury and Sidney Crosby on the same team, Patrick Kane. That’s it.
But when you have great players to build around, you have a chance to build something great. With a septuagenarian general manager and a coach who treats losing like he’s biting down on a leather strap — and a goalie, now — the question is, how high, how fast?
“Well, you guys ask me that every three weeks,” Babcock said. “We like to speed it up as fast as we possibly can. Getting good players helps you get better. He’s a kid, though. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. You see lots of kids go lots of places around the league. And to me, if you surround them with some good veterans, you have a chance.”
But the search for 30th is over now. Matthews was the end of that. Now comes what’s next.
“You know, that’s really up to them, when we go out on the ice and we start playing,” Shanahan said. “It’s up to how people come together, what kind of an offseason our guys have, and how quickly people gel. While it’s a very compelling and interesting question as to where are we in the upward trajectory, what’s more important to us is, we have an upward trajectory.
“We said it last year: we wanted to become a team that could have success and be sustainable. And where we are in that timeline . . . we’ll win a few games and people will say we’re ahead, and we’ll lose a few games and people will say we’re not. It doesn’t matter to me as much as whether we’re moving forward, and whether we’re moving towards the ultimate goal, which is to become a championship organization.
“We’re just trying to get better. People need to understand that if we go out and get a player that would fit into that plan, we’re not scrapping the plan, we’re actually following the plan. What we’re doing is chasing the vision. (Drafting Matthews is) incredibly significant. We see it as an important piece, but hockey’s a team game, you need to surround people with other people.
“But tonight we get a very important piece, a centrepiece, to this young core of guys that we’re putting together.”
Auston Matthews may never be the captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs; Morgan Rielly may get there first. But he will feel the pressure Sundin felt, and maybe the adulation, too. He will be an 18-year-old hero in a city starved for a hockey team that doesn’t embarrass it, or break its heart. The task is mammoth, for all of them.
“We appreciate that people like what we’re doing, but we understand how far away we still are,” Shanahan said. “Even though you can say that when you’re building a house that you laid a beautiful foundation, but there’s still no walls, you’re still not living in it. There’s no roaring fire. You haven’t built a great house yet: you’ve maybe done the first steps.”
The first steps are complete. The climb, wherever it leads, starts now.