Auston Matthews Is Hurt And The Maple Leafs Are Burnt Toast

This has been in almost all ways a foul season for the Toronto Maple Leafs. They are Canada’s daily media poison in the same ways that the Lakers, Cowboys, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and the Dodgers’ payroll are America’s, and offer similarly scant nutritional value. But clearly, if anyone involved wanted to change our consumption diets, we would have at least stopped eating that second bowl of ice cream by now.

And say this much for the latest edition of Leafs Institutional Misery: It has been busy. Toronto’s season has been a cavalcade of hope-turned-to-manure almost since Canadian Thanksgiving, to the point where the wheels of their nine-year streak of underachieving in the playoffs had come off the wagon entirely, and in the worst imaginable way. From Jan. 12 through yesterday, they had gone 4-12-4, and hadn’t won a single game against an American-based team. Since the National Hockey League is 78 percent American, this presents a real mathematical challenge to glory, with the result being that this Leafs season has been abandoned and the arguments about it have morphed into how many people at multiple organizational levels must be fired for cause, and what specific star they should be fired into. Their talent level has been mocked, their basic team structure besmirched, even their molecular GAF has been shamed. To satisfy an incandescent fan base and begin the desperately needed rebuild, something is going to need to be done, mostly to someone else.

That does not separate the Leafs from any other forlorn team, of course, and as a result Thursday night’s game against Anaheim held minimal interest and emitted minimal significance—until it very much did. The unimportant part is that the Leafs won, 6-4, to break an eight-game losing streak, which in its own way is another bad result for those who support the idea of a catastrophic bottom-out for the sake of draft lottery odds and getting a jump-start on the reconstruction work ahead. But under the theory that you can still have your house catch fire when it rains, this win was way worse than that. That’s because the team’s captain and best player, Auston Matthews, had his knee crushed on an open-ice knee-to-knee hit from Anaheim’s notorious troublemaker Radko Gudas. This takes the worst-case scenario and turbocharges it.

The hit itself, with four minutes and change left in the second period, was universally condemned as dirty business, done by someone well versed in that genre. Gudas is a veteran defenseman with a well-chronicled indifference to the safety of others—he’s been suspended four separate times for different kinds of dangerous plays in his career, and a legal hit he put on Sidney Crosby in the Olympics is still held as a prime reason the Canadians eventually lost the gold medal—and knee-to-knee ranks near the top of the list of hockey’s high crimes and misdemeanors. The best one can say for Gudas is that his intention was not to injure Matthews, but even that is open for debate among the more stridently unhinged. In short, Gudas has an M.O., and Leafs fans have a full side of beef here.

In this case, Gudas had been beaten on a developing play by Matthews, whom dilettantes may remember as the heart of the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal run, and then made a cynical and indisputably dangerous play to disrupt the rush. A suspension is regarded as de rigueur here.

But the beauty of the Leafs, as it is with the Cowboys, Manchester United, Real, and the WNBA labor negotiations, is that dissatisfaction is a layer cake. The new outrage for Leafs fans is that none of Matthews’ teammates dropped gloves and exacted immediate frontier justice upon Gudas. Even head coach Craig Berube, whose job security has gone from tenuous to “of course he’s fired, why do we even have to waste time discussing it?” made a point of mentioning the tepid reaction from Matthews’ colleagues, saying, “We should’ve had four guys in there doing something about it.” And veteran defenseman Morgan Rielly concurred, saying, “It’s on me for not responding earlier to Gudas. It’s a dirty hit. I didn’t understand how bad he got him in the moment. But I take full responsibility for not being the first one in there or being in there quicker to respond.”

Hockey has its rituals, to be sure, and futile gestures of retribution in the moment are chief among them; it is the only sport in which fighting is not the object of the game but is very much allowed as a tool to be applied toward that goal. Someone does you dirty, as they will, and you eschew the opportunity to do them dirty back at the risk of your reputation. Revenge is a dish served piping hot in this case, and once it reaches room temperature you’ve waited too long. And so, in a season full of Leafy dissatisfactions, this particular outrage ranks surprisingly high. The Leafs and Ducks got into several shield-clashings in the third period, well after the Matthews incident, but none of the true believers were having any of that. The Leafs were found guilty of not performatively avenging their crumpled captain’s honor, and this was proof, if proof were still needed among the fan base, that the team stopped wanting to care. That is one level further down from merely not caring. That is bad.

And because the Leafs make the most ripples in Canada’s sporting culture, this became a new way for the people who love them the most to hate them even more. Steve Glynn (stage name Steve Dangle), who long ago seized the high ground of internet-voice-of-the-fan with both a podcast and postgame reaction videos known as Leafs Fan Reaction, put together a solid and convincingly off-his-meds faux screed within minutes of the game’s end in which the main theme was that when the Leafs and Ducks play again March 30 in Anaheim, “There is no puck.” That is to say that the game should not be a game at all but a series of line brawls, which are coming back into fashion in these culturally and politically perilous times. If nothing else, Dangle speaks to the mindset of his very disaffected audience, given that the playoffs are no longer a consideration and the depths and purpose of the degradation are the only remaining discussion points, Leafs fans want their discredited heroes to at least leave a fist-sized mark on this long-abandoned season.

And it’s good that they have this outlet, we guess. We may all agree that all the regular seasons are too long, but that theory implies replacing them with an offseason that would be too long, and every good idea comes with a 13 percent excise tax. The Leafs and their fan base have 16 games left to decide how they are going to relate to each other in what will be a cold and mostly shitty offseason. Especially for Auston Matthews.