Did Auston Matthews do enough to change the narrative?

For the first time since turning professional, Auston Matthews is a winner. The superstar center has received plenty of criticism over the years for his inability to get the Toronto Maple Leafs far in the Stanley Cup Final, but that’s changed with the 2026 Olympics. The United States captured gold for the first time in best-on-best with Matthews as the captain, and he finished the tournament with three goals and seven points in the six games, including an assist on the opening goal in the 2-1 overtime win over Canada.

But has Matthews’ success in the Olympics change his narrative and proven the critics wrong, or did he still not do enough? Jonny Lazarus and Tyler Yaremchuk talked about Matthews’ performance in the gold medal game and whether it was clutch enough for his standards.

Jonny Lazarus: It did become a thing last year where, yeah, awesome, Matthews was great defensively, he shut guys down, but he didn’t score a goal in the entire 4 Nations. I mean, he’s known as a goal scorer. In this game, you definitely understand that he was playing in that shutdown role, and you weren’t necessarily asking for him to score, knowing how loaded Canada was up front. So it was a little hard to be critical of his offense in the last few games.

That said, that one opportunity we can criticize, but we could put that behind us because he really didn’t make many mistakes in that game. He was great defensively. He did break up a lot of plays and we needed that. Had this gone the other way, you could have flipped it and said, “Matthews in 3-on-3 in overtime, he couldn’t be the guy again”. It could have easily been that. But they won. He helped get them to win, and that’s all that matters.

Tyler Yaremchuk: I think Matthews, yes, he made some good defensive plays, all that. I still look at that like, the defining moment for Matthews in this game is when he didn’t shoot the puck. 10 years from now, I’m not going to look back on this game and be like, “boy, was Matthews ever good defensively”. I would remember this game if Auston Matthews scored a big goal.

I think at the end of the day, as much as you can compare him to Bergeron and Barkov and the Selke-level centermen, Austin Matthews is a goal scorer first and foremost, and he should be remembered if he does or doesn’t score a big goal for you.

You can watch the full episode here…