Maple Leafs’ recent run of success almost makes Auston Matthews look expendable

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On Sunday against Utah, Mitch Marner expanded on his brief for re-admittance into Toronto’s good books.

Everybody in the city who wanted him strapped to a rocket six months ago is having second thoughts. Fourteen points in eight games during which the team have gone 7-1 will do that.

More than points, Marner’s case might be helped most by something that isn’t there – his linemate, Auston Matthews.

When Matthews exited with an unidentified injury three weeks ago, Marner and the Leafs got more than better. They became more playoff-like.

The go-go Leafs that have typified the Matthews-Marner-Nylander era become the grind-you-down Leafs once you remove Matthews from the equation. Marner in particular seems to bloom once he is elevated from the No. 2. He plays bigger. He even looks bigger.

After Sunday’s win, Marner was asked if he was surprised the team had done so well without its captain. You could see him really thinking about it before settling on the political answer.

“Um. We have a lot of great players regardless if it’s on our team or on the Marlies …” and so on and so forth.

I’m sure he didn’t mean it this way, but if you tilt your head just so it sounds like Marner is saying the best pure goal scorer in the league can be replaced by a fifth-liner brought up from the AHL.

That would be a ridiculous claim until you look at the numbers. When Matthews is out of the lineup, the Leafs are 42-20-2. That’s enough hockey to rule out a fluke.

It’s difficult to extend this comparison into the playoffs. In his nine years as a Leaf, Matthews has only missed two postseason games. But the Leafs did win them both.

Matthews is due to return as soon as Wednesday against the Panthers. If Toronto beats the defending champions, this storyline gets dropped. If Matthews scores in that win, some people may apologize for even mentioning it.

If the Leafs then go on to top the Atlantic and lay waste to their opponents in the first and second playoff rounds, people will agree this was a statistical anomaly. Auston Matthews for prime minister.

But if this year plays out the way every other one during this fool’s golden generation has done, it’s getting harder to explain away what seems to be becoming obvious. That maybe Marner isn’t the problem. Maybe it isn’t goaltending, or the coach, or the power play. Maybe it’s that the Toronto Maple Leafs and their best player aren’t a fit.

There’s no easy way to prove that a great player doesn’t belong on your team, which is why no one ever tries. We treat athletes like widgets in this way. If he scored there, he should score here. If she won there, she should win here.

When that doesn’t happen, it’s never the player’s fault. It’s somebody else’s mistake. The coach coached them wrong, or their teammates teammated poorly. It’s the high-school rule of grading – if you get an A on the first essay, you’re an A student forever, regardless of the quality of subsequent work.

But aside from scoring a ton of regular-season goals, what has Matthews achieved in nearly a decade as a Leaf?

Were he to quit hockey today, you’d say he was the Alexander Mogilny or Pavel Bure of his generation. A player of unique quality, but in a vacuum. Too often, his brilliance wasn’t contagious.

You could say the same thing of the rest of Matthews’s Leafs cohort – Marner, William Nylander and John Tavares. Except that none of those guys are the guy.

Somebody has to be to blame if a team this tooled up keeps blowing it. After you’ve fired two coaches and two GMs, maybe the first person with their arm raised should be the guy turning into a US$13-million pumpkin in the playoffs.

This isn’t Matthews’s fault. It’s not like he’s trying to lose. But good teams follow the leader. The Bruins don’t win when Brad Marchand is scuffling. Ditto every other winning team and the player on their roster we most associate with that winning way. Winning is how they got their reputation as winners.

Toronto produces losers with great excuses. It helps that there is no tall poppy making everyone else look bad. Say this much for the Leafs, they lose like they win – as a team.

The safest way to fix it is by refusing to admit that anything is broken. It’s worked so far.

Matthews scored 69 goals last year. Give the Leafs one good reason to trade a player like that. As a management group, they don’t even have to bother deflecting. They just bug their eyes and laugh.

But you move a star for the same reason you’d move anyone else – because it isn’t working out. And based on a pretty great sample, it’s not working out in Toronto.

This is not to suggest that the Leafs will trade Matthews because a) contractually, they can’t do that and b) because it’s too bold a decision to be made by any NHL executive, particularly one in a risk-allergic market like Toronto.

Trading Matthews turns the Leafs fan base feral. It won’t be domesticated again until you can prove it was the right move – at least a year later. Maybe two or three. That would be long after whichever president and GM made the call has been fired for their own safety.

So even if they should, the Leafs will never move Matthews. If he wants to leave – and why would he? – he’ll have to be the one to make that happen.

That makes this a purely theoretical exercise. Perhaps in the fullness of time it will become obvious that the Leafs failed out of an abundance of common sense.

Common sense tells you that you should hold on tight to the best players in the game. Sometimes, the results say otherwise. But only the results matter.