Matt Murray Is Now Toronto's Only Hope For Keeping Auston Matthews In Town
Andre Ringuette. Getty Images.For the 17th season in a row, the Toronto Maple Leafs failed to win a playoff series. The last time the Leafs won a series in the Stanley Cup Playoffs was the conference quarterfinals against Ottawa in 2004. Then they went on to lose in the conference semis to the Flyers. Since then there was a lockout, 1 series lost in the qualifying round of the Bubble in 2020, 6 series lost in the first round, and 10 seasons when they did not qualify for the playoffs.
The clock is quickly running out of time in Toronto. Auston Matthews becomes an unrestricted free agent on July 1, 2024. Auston Matthews has won more Hart (1), Rocket Richard (2), and Calder Trophies (1) than he has won playoff series with Toronto (0). It's pretty hard to see a world where he decides to stick around in Toronto after another 2 seasons if something doesn't drastically change.
So what big change does Kyle Dubas have in mind?
Now here's the thing--goalies are impossible to predict. The moment you think that one guy is great, he starts to stink. The moment you think that one guy sucks, he magically turns it on and has an unbelievable season. There are only a handful of goalies in this league who you can truly count on to be great all the time, and they're named Andrei Vasilevskiy. So sure, Matt Murray has been downright horrendous since getting sent to Ottawa. He dealt with concussion issues in the 2017-18 season, more concussion and injury issues in the 2018-19 season, more concussions with Ottawa which ended his season last year, and now is at the point where the Sens had to package in 2 draft picks just to get rid of him. Pretty drastically steep fall from grace after winning back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017.
But again, these are goalies we're talking about here. He's won 2 of these things before, there's no reason to fully count out the possibility that he could lead another team to do it again. He's still just 28 years old. But it's either Matt Murray magically finds his game again and finds it immediately, or the Toronto Maple Leafs blow the whole damn thing up and go back to another decade plus of irrelevance. I have to admit that I love both of those outcomes. I love a good comeback story and my delicate little soul would be so happy for Matt Murray if he was able to have a career resurgence year. I also love chaos and cynic in me takes great pleasure in watching Toronto fans wallow in misery and despair. Credit to Kyle Dubas on giving us a win-win situation here. I can't imagine Toronto fans feel the same way, but I love what this fella is doing.
P.S. -- Play "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette