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Because of his hat trick in a 4-3 win over the Calgary Flames on Thursday evening, famous person Toronto Maple Leafs ahead Auston Matthews elevated his league-leading objective whole to a whopping 37 goals in just 42 games. That not solely offers him a four-goal lead over the No. 2 scorer (Florida’s Sam Reinhart), however he has finished it in two fewer video games. It additionally places him on tempo for a objective whole that the NHL has not seen in over 30 years.
At his present tempo Matthews is on monitor to attain 72 targets over an 82-game season. The NHL has not had a 70-goal season since Teemu Selanne and Alexander Mogilny each scored 76 targets throughout the 1992-93 season. It is usually a mark that has solely been reached 14 instances in league historical past, with nearly all of them occurring between the 1980 and 1993 seasons when goal-scoring within the NHL was at an all-time excessive. Solely Phil Esposito’s 76 targets throughout the 1970-71 season got here outdoors of that window.
Aside from Reinhart, no person else within the NHL has even cracked the 30-goal mark this season as of Friday.
Matthews has change into one of many prime goal-scorers within the NHL and has scored at the very least 40 targets in 5 of his first seven seasons within the league. The one two years he failed to achieve that mark (2017-18 and 2018-19) have been years the place he was restricted to simply 62 and 68 video games respectively. In each years he was on tempo for effectively over 40 targets had he been wholesome sufficient to play a full season.
It was simply two years in the past that he reached the 60-goal mark, making him one in every of simply 5 gamers to hit that mark since 1995 (Connor McDavid, Alex Ovechkin, Steven Stamkos and David Pastrnak are the others). It additionally set a Maple Leafs franchise single-season report.
Now he’s on monitor to steamroll previous that quantity.
He is without doubt one of the few constant vibrant spots on a Maple Leafs staff that has underwhelmed by way of the primary half of the season. They’re nonetheless occupying a playoff spot, however have simply the sixth-best report within the Jap Convention and Eleventh-best report within the NHL. Expectations are considerably increased than that for this Toronto staff given its big-money expertise on the prime of the roster. Matthews, Mitch Marner, John Tavares and William Nylander all personal contracts that pay them greater than $10 million per season and are below strain to lastly make noise within the playoffs. This core group has managed only a single playoff sequence win in seven years. The playoffs are what Maple Leafs followers care about, and if they do not make a deep run, all the particular person objective totals will not be going to imply something to them.
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