Toronto Maple Leafs’ Auston Matthews scores second hat trick in second game of season

It seems that Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews doesn’t want to have another down season.

Matthews continued off of his dynamic season opening performance with another hat trick against the Minnesota Wild on Saturday. His first goal came off a Mitch Marner pass into the slot that he buried in the first period to tie the game at 1-1 for the Leafs. Matthews followed that up a minute and a half later on the power play with his second goal, a shot from a tight angle that gave the Leafs a 2-1 lead. He completed the hat trick midway through the third period with a wraparound goal to give the Leafs a 6-3 lead. The Leafs ended up winning the game 7-4.

The performance comes after Matthews’ hat trick in the season opener on Wednesday against the Montreal Canadiens. He scored the first game-tying goal in the second period of that game to make it 2-2, and followed up with the two goals to help overcome the second two-goal deficit that the Leafs faced in that game to tie it 5-5. The Leafs would go on to win that game in the shootout 6-5.

With this performance, Matthews becomes the fifth player in NHL history to score a hat trick in both of his first two games of the season. Three of the four come in the NHL’s inaugural season in 1917-18 from Cy Denneny, Joe Malone and Reg Noble, with the fourth coming exactly 100 years later from Alex Ovechkin in the 2017-18 season.

The back-to-back hat tricks gives Matthews six goals in two games, and six points total as he has yet to get a point on the season. It currently puts him on pace to score 246 goals this season. It also gets him 15% of the way to his 40 goal season in 2022-23, which was considered a down season for the center.