Can Auston Matthews score 500 goals before he turns 30?
Auston Matthews couldn’t have started his 2023-24 campaign any better.
The Toronto Maple Leaf forward scored a hat trick in the team’s season opener to help fuel a comeback win against the Montreal Canadiens, then followed it up three days later with another hat trick against the Minnesota Wild, giving him six goals in the team’s first two games.
Even without scoring in the three games since, Matthews is still tied for the league lead in goals (as of Oct. 22). Coming off a 40-goal 2022-23 season that many considered a “down year,” the 2016 No. 1 pick has looked every bit of the generational goal scorer he’s been through his first seven seasons in the NHL.
Matthews’ first goal vs. the Habs happened to be the 300th of his career. Now with 305 goals through 486 career NHL games, Matthews’ goals-per-game rate of 0.63 puts him on pace to score 500 before he hits the age of 30. Only two players in history have achieved such a feat: Wayne Gretzky and Mike Bossy.
Can Matthews do it? First off, let’s look at some numbers…
• Matthews has scored at least 40 goals in five of his seven seasons in the league. What’s just as impressive is that in the two seasons he didn’t — 34 in 2017-18 and 37 2018-19 — he only played 62 and 68 games, respectively.
• He won the Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy twice, in 2020-21 with 41 goals in 52 games, and in 2021-22 with 60 goals in 73 games. In 2019-20, his 47 goals in 70 games were one goal behind David Pastrnak and Alex Ovechkin for the league lead.
• His 0.82 goals per game in 2021-22 was the highest of any player in a single season in the 21st century. The only players to come close were Mario Lemieux in 2000-21 with 0.81, Ovechkin in 2007-08 with 0.79 and…Matthews, again, with 0.79 in 2020-21.
• Matthews has averaged 3.87 shots-per-game in his career, putting him sixth on the all-time list of players since the 1967-68 season, the first campaign after the league expanded to 12 teams.
• Throughout his career, he has a 15.8 shooting percentage. Over the course of an 82-game season, if Matthews were to continue his 15.8 shooting percentage at a rate of 3.87 shots-per-game, he would average 51.6 goals-per-season.
• The 0.63 goals-per-game I mentioned earlier? That’s fifth all-time in NHL history (minimum 200 games played), and two of the players ahead of him were born in the 19th century. That means only Bossy and Mario Lemieux are ahead of him in the post-First World War era.
• Matthews is first among active players in goals per game, a full 0.2 ahead of Ovechkin.
Look at the big picture. Do you know how many people have played at least one game in the NHL? Thousands. Nearly 8,000, actually. This league has given us some worldly talents that produced at an elite level for years and years. But as of October 2023, only 47 players in its history have scored 500 regular season goals or more.
As mentioned earlier, only two players scored 500 goals before turning 30 — Gretzky and Bossy. Matthews was born on Sept. 17, 1997, so he will turn 30 in 2027. That would mean he has until the end of the 2026-27 regular season to hit the 500-goal mark. Currently sitting at 305, he’ll have to average 50 goals for the next four seasons.
Some of the game’s greatest just missed out on the feat: Lemieux turned 30 three weeks before hitting 500 (he missed his entire age 29 season in 1994-95 due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma); Ovechkin turned 30 three months before scoring his 500th goal; Steve Yzerman was 30 for eight months before doing it; Jaromir Jagr was a week away from turning 31 when he did it; Guy Lafleur, Marcel Dionne, Jari Kurri, Brett Hull and Phil Esposito were 32 when they hit 500.
Injuries have affected Matthews’ career, only playing more than 68 games in four of his seven full seasons. Yes, the COVID-19 pandemic affected some of those numbers, particularly the 2021-22 season, and who knows how many goals he would have scored if that were a full season (0.82 goals-per-game over an 82-game stretch is 67, by the way).
But if Matthews were to play at least 70 games every season from now until the end of 2026-27, keeping up with his 15.8 shooting percentage at a rate of 3.87 shots-per-game, he could do it.
If he doesn’t do it, well, does it matter? He’ll score 500 goals at some point, and there’s a case to be made that he’ll end up among Gretzky and Ovechkin near the top of the all-time list when it’s all said and done.
Of course, if you asked him about it, he’ll say he’s more focused on winning games and helping the Maple Leafs get their first Stanley Cup championship since 1967.
But to win games and raise banners, you need to score goals, and Matthews is damn good at that. By the time he retires, he might be the best to ever do it.
Stats were provided by Hockey-Reference.com.