Last season, Auston Matthews lit up the scoresheet scoring 69 goals—taking home the Rocket Richard Trophy for the third time in his career—good for 15th all-time for goal scoring in a single NHL season. That high output had many Leafs fans excited to see if Matthews could up that total even more in the 2024–25 season. After a silent start, Matthews has finally returned to some semblance of form, and it begs the question of how this season’s start compares to his past years and whether he could still capture the Rocket Richard and hit or surpass his career-best goal mark from a season ago.
In the first few games of the season, Matthews was eerily quiet, putting up not even a single point through the first three games. Luckily for Leafs Nation, that changed during the Oct. 16 game against the Los Angeles Kings when the star centre put up one goal and three points in a 6–2 Leafs victory. Matthews has scored a goal in two of the three games since then and now has three goals and five points in seven games, somewhat returning to form.
His previous seasons
While not the electric start fans had hoped for, how does this compare to his goal output from a season ago? To start the 2023–24 season, Matthews came out of the gate red hot, generating a hat trick in each of the first two regular-season games. He then, however, went pointless in the next three contests before scoring just one goal in the first of the following two games, good for seven goals and nine points in the first seven games—clearly a better overall scoring output than his start to this current season.
If we go a year earlier in the 2022–23 season, it looks more similar to the current season but worse. Matthews actually only registered a single goal through the first seven games, but with his five assists managed a six-point total. The year prior in 2021–22—a year that saw Matthews take home his second Rocket Richard Trophy and the Hart Trophy, putting up 60 goals and 106 points total—he put up just three goals and four points through the first seven games. And in the pandemic-shortened 2020–21 season where Matthews would go on to take home his first Rocket Richard with 41 goals in 52 games, he put up four goals and eight points in the first seven regular-season games.
As we can see through these numbers that came during award-winning seasons, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. In fact, the only seasons where Matthews had a truly electric first seven games were in the 2018–19 and 2019–20 seasons where he scored 10 and seven goals respectively through seven tilts, and those were seasons that didn’t even see Matthews take home any hardware. If one thing’s for sure, it’s that we can’t necessarily determine if a season’s going to be a down year based solely on his first seven games.
Can he do it?
As last season showed, only time can tell if the scoring output will climb to new heights. Despite his pair of hat tricks to open the 2023–24 season, it wasn’t until December that Matthews truly upped his game, grabbing 15 goals and 21 points that month and then kept his monthly goal totals in double digits for two of the next four months. As should be obvious, it takes a full season of grind to put up big numbers, even for a generational talent like Matthews.
It isn’t as easy as a simple yes or no on whether Matthews can equal or surpass his 69 goals from last season or take home the 2025 Rocket Richard Trophy solely based on his play thus far. As we can see from previous seasons, super early goal stats don’t automatically equal career years or potential accolades. The good news is, he’s Auston Matthews, arguably the most skilled star the Leafs have seen in the history of their storied franchise. We know he will score, that is a given. And with his goal-scoring seemingly back in form as of the last few games, I’m hopeful that he can turn what was seen as a sluggish start, into a red-hot season.
