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Chapter 1: A Four-Goal Debut CHAPTER ONE A Four-Goal Debut
Auston Matthews carried the puck down the right wing into the Ottawa zone, leading to a mad scramble in front of the Senators net. Matthews chopped at it. William Nylander took a shot that ricocheted to Zach Hyman, who carried the puck behind the net and fed Matthews on the right side of the crease. And in the blink of an eye Matthews shovelled a one-timer past the Ottawa goalie Craig Anderson.
Auston Matthews, the can’t-miss rookie, didn’t miss. He had his first NHL goal. It came on his first shot, at 8:21 of the first period of his first NHL game, the first goal by anyone of the 2016–17 season.
There may be no greater feeling in hockey than scoring. For goal scorers—players who make their living as the go-to guys for their teams—it’s the adrenaline rush that drives them. For the fans who watch, seeing their team score, or their favourite player score, is another form of elation, validating all the time spent loving their team and reading about the player in the off-season. For the media covering the game, it’s the story they want to tell: the kid making good, getting that first goal.
It had all fallen into place in the first period of the first NHL game Auston Matthews played. There would be no waiting. An easy, feel-good story to tell for Leaf fans all too accustomed to bad things happening to their favourite team. For the twelfth time in league history, the first overall pick from the previous draft scored in his first game.
And then Matthews scored again.
The second goal came with 5:42 left in the first period, on his second shot of the game. He won a puck battle with Mark Stone at the blue line, lost it briefly but got it back from two-time Norris Trophy winner Erik Karlsson, then lifted the puck over Marc Methot and beat Craig Anderson with an odd-angled forehand.
“What a goal, Matthews, magnificent,” play-by-play caller Paul Romanuk told his Hockey Night in Canada audience. “You see that second goal he scored? Not many guys do that,” Coach Mike Babcock said after the game. For just the second time in NHL history, the first overall pick scored twice in his first game. Matthews joined Alex Ovechkin with the honour.
But Matthews wasn’t done rewriting the NHL Official Guide and Record Book.
Another goal, his hat-trick goal, came on a one-timer from inside the right circle on a feed from Morgan Rielly 1:25 into the second period. The game was in Ottawa, but Leaf fans travel well, and the ice at the Canadian Tire Centre was showered with hats. He had scored three goals on three shots.
“Oh my goodness, what a debut,” Romanuk told viewers.
He was already acting like a veteran. The first two goals got big-time “cellys,” or celebrations. The third was more muted, pointing at Rielly to thank him for the pass. In the stands, Matthews’s mother, Ema, was jumping up and down, giving out high fives.
Matthews had become the first number-one overall pick to score three times in his debut. Four other players had done it as far back as 1943, what the NHL calls the onset of its modern era.
The Montreal Canadiens forward Alex Smart scored January 14, 1943, against Chicago.
Quebec Nordiques forward Réal Cloutier did it October 10, 1979, versus Atlanta. He’d already played five years in the WHA.
Dallas Stars forward Fabian Brunnström accomplished the feat October 15, 2008, against Nashville. He was twenty-three and undrafted but had been a pro in Sweden.
Impressively, New York Rangers forward Derek Stepan did it October 9, 2010, against Buffalo. He was twenty, two years removed from being a second-round pick in 2008, after spending two seasons at the University of Wisconsin. Matthews was the youngest to have done it, having turned nineteen on September 17.
Sportsnet’s cameras turned to Auston’s parents, Brian and Ema. Ema was wiping tears from her eyes. At the second intermission, rinkside reporter Christine Simpson caught up with the parents.
“Those were tears of joy,” Ema Matthews told Sportsnet’s viewing audience. “I feel very excited. This is what Auston has been dreaming since he was six, to be playing right here in the NHL.”
“I hope that nobody’s going to wake me up here anytime soon,” Brian Matthews said. “This is unbelievable.”
Christine Simpson—perhaps only half jokingly—wondered to the parents if Auston had a fourth goal in him.
He did. The fourth goal followed a give-and-go with William Nylander. Matthews lifted the puck past Anderson after blowing by a defender in the slot. “You are looking at the first player ever to score four goals in an NHL debut,” gushed Romanuk.
“I think everybody was like, ‘What’s going on here?’” Matthews told reporters that night. “Like I said, you don’t really draw it up like that.”
Zach Hyman, his left winger that night and for most of their time together on the Maple Leafs, recalled the evening in wonder. “It was a surreal experience. I think it was surreal for him. I remember being in the locker room with him. After the second period, he had three by then. I think he was a little bit in shock himself. Like, how can you not be? Pretty special. You got four goals, or they’re all scored a different way, right. Just a great debut.”
Karlsson—just about as gifted a player as there was in the NHL at the time—was equally impressed.
“He got four scoring chances, and he scored four goals,” said Karlsson that night. “Two of them, most people probably can’t do. Good for him, and good for Toronto having a player like that.”
Most rookies get one souvenir puck for their first NHL goal. Matthews got four. “I’ll probably give them to my mom. She usually does something nice with them.”
It’s not like the Senators didn’t know what Matthews could do. They, more than any team, should have been prepared. Their assistant coach was Marc Crawford, who had coached Matthews the season prior in Switzerland. “He said, ‘This guy is good. He can do this, and he can do that,’” said Anderson. “It’s not like we didn’t believe him. But there wasn’t an extra emphasis on him.
“Him able to do the things we talked about—pickpocketing, stealing the puck, quick release—that night, everything went right for him. Every time the puck was on his stick, he made something magical happen. He lived up to the hype.”
Earlier in the day, Matthews’s teammates had been talking about his maturity level, given he was just nineteen and the youngest player on the team.
“He’s not like a kid,” said veteran forward Leo Komarov. “He’s more like a guy who’s played in this league already.”
“He’s not afraid of anything,” said veteran defenceman Roman Polák.
“He’s a man,” Coach Mike Babcock told the media gathered in Ottawa for the game. “He’s nineteen years old, but he acts like he’s twenty-seven. He has great maturity. If you meet his mom and dad, you’re thoroughly impressed with the kind of people they are, and the respect he has for his mom and sisters, the kind of guy he is. Don’t get me wrong, we would have drafted him anyway, but that makes him more special.”
After the game, Matthews joked the last time he scored four times was probably “in mites.” But he showed his colours with his next comment.
“It’s really something you can’t write up,” Matthews said. “And it was pretty special having my parents here for them to share the moment with me.”
Family, for Matthews, is everything. His father, Brian, was a technology officer who played college baseball and encouraged his kids to play sports. His mother, Ema, was a former flight attendant who left Mexico to pursue her dreams and encouraged her kids to do the same. She worked two jobs, including as a barista, to help make ends meet. Older sister Alexandria was trying her hand at being a social media influencer with lifestyle, beauty, and fitness videos, and younger sister Breyana would pursue golf. They’re a tight-knit group.
“They’ve been a huge part of my career, it was only right for them to be there for the first one,” said Matthews.
In fact, Brian Matthews—ever the dad, the coach, and one-time college athlete—would usually talk to Auston after a game, just to check in.
“When the moment’s right, he does a pretty good job separating hockey from life in general,” Auston said to the Toronto Sun. “It’s not always hockey, hockey, hockey. That helped when I was younger, to let go a little bit. I can only imagine how emotional my mom was getting up there. I saw a couple of videos of them.”
As the goals piled up, the reaction from fans was understandably excited. But it was the reaction from current and past NHLers that really stood out. Twitter, as X was called then, was abuzz.
“What a way to start a career,” posted Maple Leafs great Doug Gilmour.
“Feels like I’m watching mite hockey where there’s that one kid who’s just way better than everyone else,” posted Martin St. Louis.
“Welcome to our beer league,” tweeted Penguins defenceman Kris Letang.
“Since the start of this game, I didn’t even get a chance to drink four beers, and he’s got four goals,” said LA Kings sniper Marián Gáborík.
“Most guys would be thrilled to score four in a month,” posted ex-Leaf Viktor Stålberg.
“I feel like I’m watching one of the 99 overall created players I used to make in NHL 2002,” wrote Marlies goalie Garrett Sparks.
Ryan Callahan tweeted to his ex-Rangers teammate Derek Stepan that his three-goal debut against Buffalo “is not looking so impressive anymore.”
Paul Bissonnette: “Would pay money to see Auston Matthews’s DMs right now.”
And Aaron Ward: “That moment Auston Matthews gets four in first career game, causing you to reflect on your NHL career and wondering if you even got four in practice.”
But the best deadpan probably belonged to the best deadpanning goalie in the league in that era: Panthers goalie Roberto Luongo. He declared, “I’ve just decided that Reims [James Reimer] will play all of the games versus the Leafs this year.”
“What’s the big deal? I scored four goals... in my career. #matthews #bust,” said Frazer McLaren. In fact, he scored two of his four career goals (over 102 career games) with the Maple Leafs.
Canadian actor Stephen Amell, star of the TV show Arrow, which was going head-to-head with the Leafs game on TV that night, also chimed in. “After Auston Matthews’s fourth goal, I’m just going to accept that the only person in Toronto watching Arrow is my mom.”
Even Craig Anderson got into it. The next time the two teams faced each other, the Ottawa netminder asked Auston to autograph his goalie stick. “Thanks ‘four’ making my first game memorable,” Matthews penned.
Matthews had the world’s attention. The NHL tried to put it all into context with North America’s other major league sports. Citing the Elias Sports Bureau, the league said: “No player has ever hit three home runs in his MLB debut; the last to hit two was Trevor Story on April 4, 2016. The last player to record three touchdowns in his NFL debut was Marshall Faulk on September 4, 1994. The most points recorded by a player making his NBA debut is 43, achieved by Wilt Chamberlain on October 24, 1959.”
What might have mattered to Matthews more was happening back in Arizona. The people who were close to him, his former coaches and teammates, were gushing with pride. His minor hockey Arizona Bobcats tweeted they’d seen it before, posting the score sheet of a four-goal game by Matthews when he was fourteen.
There was Sean Whyte, a journeyman pro hockey player from the Ottawa Valley, who settled in Scottsdale and ran Ozzie Ice, which featured the synthetic surface where Matthews took skating lessons.
“I was in my office at the hockey rink, and I had the TV on. I was putting my skates on, and he ended up scoring, and I was just like, ‘Oh my God, that is so amazing. First game, he scores a goal. How unbelievable is that?’ So I’m beaming. And I go on the ice, coaching my team in practice, and then someone came running out, someone said he just scored another one. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, how cool is that?’ A little while later, they tell me he just scored a hat trick, and I turned to my team and said, ‘You know what, guys? Free time. Do what you want. I’m going in.’ And I went in and started walking in my office and got to see the fourth goal. I was like, ‘This is history right now.’ Some of my players came up as well and started watching, too, so it was a pretty cool moment.”
Boris Dorozhenko, a Ukrainian Russian hockey player who was coaching in Mexico when the Matthews family approached him to teach their son his skating techniques, said, “For me, it was normal. When he was a youth, he did it many times, scoring four or five goals a game. So nothing changed for him.”
Justin Rogers, one of Matthews’s first teammates in minor hockey, said, “We knew from the start he was going to be special. And it was so exciting. We all got goose bumps. Part of you thinks maybe we are frauds down in the desert playing hockey, but then you see him produce the way he does and to have the love of the game. You don’t have to be born in Minnesota or Toronto. You can be born anywhere.”
Pat Mahan, a Minnesotan transplant who coached Matthews on the Bobcats along with his own son and put Auston up in hotel rooms to help the Matthews family defray the costs of a travelling team, said, “On one hand, obviously, it was surprising. On the other hand, it wasn’t surprising at all. For anybody to do that in any game, much less your first game, it’s unreal. But after the fact, what I thought was, ‘The world is now going to realize who they’re really dealing with.’”
“I was watching, and I was incredibly happy for Mom and Dad,” said Stanley Cup champion Claude Lemieux, who ran a hockey academy in Scottsdale when Auston was a youngster. “I couldn’t believe it. And I knew it was the start of something special.”
There was Laurence Gilman, who would become assistant GM of the Leafs in 2018, but had heard of Matthews when he was a youngster and Gilman was assistant GM of the Coyotes. “When he scored when he went down the left side and then drove the net, I thought, ‘My God, this kid is for real,’” said Gilman. “He displayed some spectacular, not just skill, but speed, strength, and courage to drive the net as hard as he did. And that’s been a hallmark of his game since day one.”
On the Ottawa bench was Marc Crawford, Matthews’s coach the season prior in Switzerland, now an associate coach with the Senators. “It was amazing, such a great happening,” said Crawford. “Such a debut for Auston.”
His former billeting teammate in USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program, goalie Luke Opilka, was with the Kitchener Rangers. “I thought it was amazing. I was so happy for him. I was super excited. Like, that’s the way to make a splash.”
Ryan Shannon, the former NHLer who became close to the entire Matthews family in having Auston as a neighbour and teammate in Zurich, was more taken in by the reactions of Brian and Ema. “It still gives me goose bumps,” said Shannon. “It started with fist pumps and hugs, and they were crying. And then the second one went in, and it was kind of like, ‘Yes.’ And then they kind of got used to it after the third. And then it was like arms up in the air and shock and astonishment after the fourth.”
The Swiss like their coffee and cake, and at the next day’s practice in Zurich, Auston’s four goals were the talk of the breakfast table.
“It was so fun to just be around the Swiss guys and the imports that had played with him,” said Shannon. “There were jokes, like, ‘He never scored four goals here. The NHL’s a joke.’ Like, ‘This league is better.’ But no one was surprised. Obviously you got to be shocked at four goals in a debut. That doesn’t happen, right? But you can see it. He is special and works really hard at it.”
Mike DeAngelis, a much-travelled defenceman from Kamloops, BC, who had become the director of the Jr. Coyotes at the Ice Den where Matthews got his start, added, “For me, it was the defining moment, that whatever path he took was the right path.”
Four goals in an NHL debut. It simply hadn’t been done in the NHL’s modern era. Not by Connor McDavid, the Newmarket phenom who’d been chosen first overall the year before Matthews. Not Wayne Gretzky, who held the NHL’s all-time leading scoring record for thirty-one years with 894 career goals. He’d famously learned the game under the tutelage of his father in a backyard rink in Brantford, Ontario. Not Alex Ovechkin, the Russian son of two Soviet Union–era athletes who surpassed Gretzky’s seemingly unbreakable record in 2025.
No one.
The first to do it was a nineteen-year-old American raised in the desert community of Scottsdale, Arizona, the son of a Mexican mother and an American father, a boy who only became a hockey fan of Canada’s sport because a team in Winnipeg relocated to Arizona and the NHL adamantly ensured it stayed there—at least for a while.
To be fair to history—and for those who would like to split a few hairs—Reg Noble of the Toronto team (they played without a nickname) scored four goals in his first game in the newly formed National Hockey League in its first season of 1917–18. Harry Hyland of the Montreal Wanderers scored five against Noble’s team in that same first NHL game, a 10–9 win by the Wanderers over the Toronto team. And Joe Malone scored five for the Montreal Canadiens that same night, December 19, 1917, when the Canadiens beat the Ottawa Senators 7–4 in the new four-team circuit.
The NHL had formed the season after the National Hockey Association had folded, playing under the same constitution and same rules, and mostly the same players. So pretty much everybody had plenty of professional experience. Noble had been with the Toronto Blueshirts. Malone had already won the Stanley Cup a couple of times (with the Quebec Bulldogs) and had been the leading scorer in the NHA three times. Hyland had started his career in 1908 with the Montreal Shamrocks and spent eight seasons in the NHA with the Wanderers. His “first” season in the NHL was his last in professional hockey.
In other words, none would be considered rookies in the professional sense back then. In fact, the Calder Trophy for the rookie of the year wasn’t even created until 1936.
So technically speaking, Matthews had done something that hadn’t been done since the absolute dawn of the league, a span of 36,092 calendar days.
Split hairs if you must.
And yes, the Leafs lost the game 5–4 in overtime to Ottawa. Matthews—showing a maturity beyond his years—took the blame for the loss, on a goal by Kyle Turris thirty-seven seconds into the extra period.
“That last play was 100 percent my fault,” Matthews told reporters after the game. “We came here to win, and we didn’t get that done. It’s a learning point for me and my team. It would have been nice to get the win.”
Still, Matthews didn’t just live up to the hype that preceded the Maple Leafs taking him first overall that June. He exceeded it. In his first game in the NHL, which propelled him forwards to an awards-filled, multimillion-dollar career. He was on his way to becoming one of the greatest goal scorers of all time and the greatest Maple Leaf ever.
Think about it: If you were going to create the greatest Maple Leaf of all time, perhaps you’d try to duplicate the upbringing of Dave Keon, who, in 2016, was named the greatest Maple Leaf of the franchise’s first hundred years. The Maple Leafs took over sponsorship of a team to buy the rights to the kid from Noranda, Quebec, in the days before the draft, developing him in their own feeder system starting with the St. Michael’s Majors.
If you were going to create the greatest American hockey player of all time, perhaps you’d try to duplicate the path of Mike Modano, the first overall pick of the Minnesota North Stars in 1988 who went on to a 1,499-game career. Modano was born in Livonia, Michigan, a fan of the Red Wings, and wore number 9 in part because of Gordie Howe. His family had to move to Westland, Michigan, just so he could play in one of the best minor hockey programs in the United States with AAA Little Caesars.
If you were going to create the greatest goal scorer of all time, you’d try to copy the path Alex Ovechkin took. His mother, Tatyana Ovechkina, is a two-time Olympic gold medallist (1976, 1980) and world champion (1975) in basketball. His father, Mikhail, was a soccer player.
If you were going to create the greatest player of all time, then it’s Wayne Gretzky’s path you’d want: backyard rinks in the cold winters of Brantford, Ontario, and a father who coached not just games but skills. Drills included skating around bleach bottles and tin cans, and flipping pucks over scattered hockey sticks in order to be able to pick up the puck again in full flight. Walter Gretzky gave the advice to “skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.”
All those greats have a few things in common: growing up in a northern, snowy climate. Rinks at the ready. Hockey on television. Playing in highly competitive leagues filled with other great players. Growing up in a community that lives and breathes the game.
One thing you might not want to do if you’re creating the greatest Maple Leaf of all time, or greatest American hockey player, or greatest goal scorer, is to start things off the way things started for Auston Matthews.
That is, in Mexico.
