After almost 10 years of being considered a player you can’t win with, Auston Matthews can finally say he’s a winner after captaining Team USA to a gold medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Matthews didn’t carry the Americans to victory by any means, but he played an important role on a team that won it all, and he’ll always have that. While many around the hockey world are starting to give him his flowers for it — and deservedly so — former NHL player, now analyst, Ray Ferraro didn’t see anything that made him believe Matthews is capable of returning to his ways of carrying the Maple Leafs as a true standalone superstar moving forward.
“Well, he is a winner; they just won. What I saw, though, is a player that didn’t step outside the team, right? Like, I think that is maybe the phase of where he’s at, he’s not a standalone player right now. He’s one of the group, very good. He was excellent, especially early in the gold medal game. I thought he was awesome. But he’s not a standalone, lead-the-charge player — in my mind, that’s not where he is. Is he better than Jack Eichel? I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter whether he scored 60 goals before or not; it’s right now he’s not. And so in the context of a team like that, I think that’s one way to look at where Matthews is, because when he comes back to Toronto, it’s not going to be the same. How could it be the same?”
The 28-year-old Matthews is coming off a solid tournament in which he tallied seven points (three goals, four assists) across six games en route to winning Gold.
Back to Reality in Toronto for Auston Matthews
While the last two weeks have been an unbelievable experience, capped off with celebrating a gold medal, Matthews will soon head back to reality, where he and the Maple Leafs are poised to miss the playoffs for the first time since he was drafted in 2016.
Everyone involved has to hope that Matthews getting a taste of winning will translate back to Toronto, but let’s not kid ourselves — his Team USA supporting cast played a massive role in that success, as Ferraro noted.
That can be said for every player who suited up for one of the top countries at the Olympics, but if fans are hoping he will suddenly tear up the league down the stretch the way a Connor McDavid or Nathan MacKinnon would, they probably need to readjust their expectations.
Matthews is still a great player and one of the best in the game, capable of scoring goals and producing every night. That being said, he’s no longer the physically imposing, dominant force he once was, and with the supporting cast around him only getting worse in recent years — most notably no longer having setup man Mitch Marner — it has all slowly started to reflect in his numbers and overall play.
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