This is the sort of topic to ask James van Riemsdyk about.

He is a veteran now, at 27. But more importantly, he’s a bright guy. He likes hockey trivia and having a good discussion about the finer points of the game. He seems to understand the nuances well — especially when it comes to creating offence – and can articulate them.

So, how hard is it to do what Auston Matthews did on Monday night, putting eight shots on goal in a single NHL game?

“Very hard,” van Riemsdyk said, chuckling. “I don’t know how many games I’ve had like that in my whole career. Maybe a handful. I didn’t realize he had that many. That’s pretty impressive.”

I checked on hockey-reference.com later in the afternoon: van Riemsdyk was exactly right. He had accomplished the feat five times, in almost 500 NHL games. Once he had nine shots, as a 22-year-old with the Flyers.

We discussed how rare it was. This season, only 38 players had eight shots or more in a game through the first 480 games, meaning it was happening about only once every 13 games.

But a rookie doing it is much rarer. A first-year player producing eight shots in a game has only happened 172 times in NHL history, going back to when the data is first available (1987). A Leafs rookie had only done it four times, ever, prior to Matthews against the Ducks.

“That’s insane,” van Riemsdyk said. “He was certainly all over the puck last night. Had a lot of good looks. It was so versatile. That tip [when he scored his 15th goal of the season] was just the prime example of how he’s so skilled at finding way to get pucks on net – maybe not with just the traditional shot. There’s different plays like that that he’s able to do, to give himself more chance to score.”

That’s just great hand-eye coordination?

“Yep. It’s also, like, all the dirty pucks he’s able to get. He’s really good at sticking his stick out with one hand and pulling the puck back out. I think a lot of it too is his edges and balance is unbelievable so he’s able to like be in different positions and still be so strong and find his way out of it. I’ve rarely ever noticed him fall down from getting hit. He always kind of just uses the momentum [of a hit], spins off and gets on his way [up the ice].”

I noticed he’s only had five or six hits this year. He kind of checks more like Pavel Datsyuk does, where he stick checks and ends up with the puck.

“Exactly. He’s really successful at that. He’s really good at using his body to put himself in good position to come up with pucks versus trying to run a guy over.”

Can you think of anyone you can compare him to?

“With that sort of stuff? It’s definitely like a similar sort of thing like Datsyuk where the puck is almost magnetized to his stick. He’s able to pull it out of these weird situations and weird piles and make plays with it.”

He’s fifth in the NHL in shots on goal. Five behind Ovechkin.

“Wow. Yeah – pretty good start to your career!”

What makes it so hard to do that in the NHL?

“To just get shots on net? With the way it is now, with the way everyone checks and pays attention to detail and defence, it’s just hard to create consistently like that, game in, game out. He’s found a way to have some consistent success so far early on.”

Is there a balance between taking too many shots and waiting for the right opportunity?

“Uhmm that’s a good question. For sure there is that. I mean you don’t just want to fire it. It’s interesting. It’s the balance of having the hockey sense of knowing when to do that and he seems to have a good feel for that. Even some of those sharp angle shots that wouldn’t be a quote-unquote good shot, he keeps the goalie guessing. He’s scored on a few of those. The first game against Ottawa, the one where he was almost on the goal line and he fired it quick from a sharp angle right through the five hole. Remember that power play the other day where he just kind of, side of the net, quick shot on net? He’s good at even turning those into good chances.”



That’s why you talk to JVR for a story like this.

You might say “big deal – eight shot games happen.” You would be right. But what’s different about what Matthews is doing is that rookies don’t produce scoring chances with this frequency. This wasn’t one anomalous game; he is averaging nearly four shots a night, a historic pace for a first-year player.

Thirty-one games into his NHL career, Matthews is on pace for 304 shots on goal. With his ice time trending up of late thanks to Mike Babcock, those totals could rise.

Three rookies in NHL history have had 300 shots in a season. The last one was Alex Ovechkin 11 years ago. Before that, it was Teemu Selanne in 1993, back when he made this a thing.



This isn’t a Jason Blake scenario either. Matthews isn’t piling up junk shots. His 13 per cent shooting percentage is very high for this low-scoring era, and it appears sustainable, given he is often shooting the puck from in tight to the goal. The path to having a huge goal scoring season is shot generation plus shooting percentage, and he is showing plenty of signs he’ll always have both.

Ovechkin is obviously on another planet in terms of shot generation, but if you chart out what Matthews has done compared to players like Selanne or Crosby, through the early portion of his career, it’s comparable. (Selanne had the luxury of facing much crappier goaltending, which was a big factor in his record-setting 76-goal season. Gretzky’s full game logs aren’t available unfortunately or I would have included his rookie season, too.)



Matthews’ shooting prowess wasn’t a secret. Marc Crawford, his coach in Switzerland last season, told me back in May that Matthews would lead all rookies in shots on goal this season. What no one realized was that he might chase the league leaders as well.

Babcock figured it out pretty quickly, which is in part why he has played Matthews with Zach Hyman and Connor Brown much of the season. He explained after practice on Tuesday that he wants Matthews with players who will get him the puck so that he can do what he does best.

“He’s a shooter,” Babcock said. “Not just a passer… Some guys are pure passers. So they need more shooters with them. But Auston likes to shoot the puck, as you can see. And he likes people that can get it to him. If you have [another] guy at the net that draws the D-man, there’s more space for him.

“I learned this a lot from Pavel and Z to be honest with you,” he added, referencing Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg, his stars in Detroit. “They want players that get them the puck back. They want the puck. They don’t want three guys on a line that want the puck. They want guys that get them the puck and they can get open.”

If you attend a Leafs game, you can see this play out often. If he’s not directly involved in the play, Matthews will often hover somewhere in nearby open ice, not far from the slot, and patiently wait out the puck battle.

If the puck comes to him, it quickly becomes a shot attempt.

Offensively, he’s already an elite weapon for the Leafs.

Babcock said the only improvement Matthews still needs is in the faceoff circle, where he is at 46.6 per cent. He believes he has “gotten a lot better” in his own end in the first third of his first season, thanks in part to video sessions detailing how players like Crosby play in the defensive zone. Babcock also doesn’t believe he needs to give Matthews a player like Mitch Marner on his wing because he simply doesn’t need him to generate chances and score as many goals as he has.

“I don’t like Marner there just because I think Marner can drive a line by himself,” Babcock said. “We need more than one line.”

“To me it doesn’t make a difference,” Matthews said. “We’ve got so many skilled guys on this team.”