Auston Matthews finally delivers a signature playoff moment for Maple Leafs in stunning Game 4 comeback

Credit: Auston Matthews (© Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports)

“They had no answer for Nikita Kucherov tonight.”

That’s a paraphrased sentence many fans or pundits have uttered during a nine-year NHL career that will earn Kucherov a ticket to the Hall of Fame someday. You name it and No. 86 has done it: Hart Trophy, Art Ross Trophy, multiple first-team all-star nods, three 100-point seasons.

But the stats that he and Tampa Bay Lightning fans care the most about, of course, are the two Stanley Cup rings, four Stanley Cup Final appearances and two times leading the postseason in scoring. Kucherov piles up the regular-season numbers, but he has shown the ability to take over in the playoffs and earn those Bud Lights, too. He accumulated 93 points in 71 games during Tampa’s consecutive Cup wins and additional Cup Final appearance between 2019-20 and 2021-22. During many of those games, he was the reason Tampa won. He has 10 career multi-goal games in the playoffs. He has 46 multi-point games. He has three or more points in 22 different playoff games. And he’s not even 30 years old.

And it was Kucherov, ho hum, Monday night in Game 4 at Amalie Arena, flicking the switch and simply taking over early on. He made two did-you-see that plays in the first period. The first was a pretty slap pass, using the threat of his own power play one-timer to freeze the Leafs before he banked the puck in off Alex Killorn’s stick blade. The second was a perfectly threaded long-distance feed to Mikhail Sergachev, catching Leafs goaltender Ilya Samsonov way out of position. That put Tampa up 2-0. It was Kucherov who opened the wound.

That’s what happens for great teams that win Stanley Cups and churn out Hall of Fame players. Their best guys take turns having their moment, seizing games, taking spectators’ breath away, sprinkling their names in the next day’s headlines. Andrei Vasilevskiy has done it. Victor Hedman has done it. Steven Stamkos. Brayden Point. And so on.

And the number we hadn’t called in that context over the past seven postseasons: the Maple Leafs’ No. 34. Auston Matthews is the 60-goal scorer, the Hart Trophy winner, truest superstar a 105-year-old franchise has ever been lucky enough to have. But while certainly he hadn’t shrunken into a shell of himself during the postseason, he had yet to deliver that moment, that game where he took over and willed his team to victory.

Matthews has been one of the better players on the ice on plenty of nights during his playoff career. He had rarely if ever been the best player on the ice. He is the greatest regular-season goal scorer of this generation, taking the torch from the previous generation’s king Alex Ovechkin. Among players with at least 300 career games in the NHL, Matthews’ 0.62 goals per game rank fifth all-time. And yet, in his first 42 career playoff games, the decade’s deadliest sniper had two multi-goal efforts. He had been held without a goal in 27 of those 42 career playoff contests. His 18 post-season goals reflected his consistently respectable but never dominant contributions.

But something simmered in Game 3 on Saturday, when Matthews showed the kind of grit you want from a star in a high-stakes game, taking some punishment in front of Tampa’s net before deflecting in a Calle Jarnkrok shot. Matthews had legitimately been one of the Leafs’ better forwards in the series in Games 1 to 3. And suddenly, it all synched up. Game 4 Monday night, with his team trying to fight back from a 4-1 deficit, Matthews was on it. “The attitude and the mindset in the locker room was just to go out there and chip away one shift at a time,” Matthews told reporters, and he got to work. First, he cashed in a pinpoint feed from Mitch Marner to close the gap to 4-2 midway through the third period. Less than three minutes later, he redirected a shot from William Nylander to make it 4-3. For perhaps the first time in his playoff career, Matthews’ opponent…did not have an answer for him.

A Morgan Rielly seeing-eye shot pulled the Leafs even at the 16:04 mark, and it was Alex Kerfoot tipping home the winning at 4:14 of overtime. Comeback complete. And it was all thanks to Matthews showing up like he never has in a playoff game before.

“He took control,” center Ryan O’Reilly told reporters Monday night. “He stepped up in a major way for us and gave us that spark. Some unbelievable plays there to get us back in the game, so it’s huge.”

The Leafs, for the umpteenth season in a row, appeared headed to the deep waters of a long, grinding series against an opponent that simply doesn’t blink under pressure and consistently responds well after defeats. But the did they unthinkable Monday, inverting the infamous ‘It was 4-1’ meme.

“We’ve always said the whole year, we believe in this team to do some crazy things, and we don’t stop trying regardless of the score of the game,” Marner told reporters.

Now, the Leafs have just their second three-game playoff winning streak in 21 years and get three tries to close out the Bolts. Toronto was in the same position two years ago and choked away three in a row against the Montreal Canadiens. As coach Sheldon Keefe said after Monday’s game, he’s not sure if killer instinct is a tangible thing, but his team is trying to find it.

Killer instinct or not, if the Leafs’ change their fate this time and win their first playoff series since 2004, it might come down to whether Matthews can stay buzzing at the superhuman frequency he discovered in Game 4.

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Auston Matthews finally delivers a signature playoff moment for Maple Leafs in stunning Game 4 comeback

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