Auston Matthews 40 Goals in 2026-27? The Real Math on the Bar

Somebody finally put a number on it

The Auston Matthews 40 goals question is live again for the first time in two years, and the way it is being argued says a lot about how this season is being previewed. Former NHL forward Mike Rupp — the Devils' 2003 Stanley Cup clincher, now a broadcaster — was asked in mid-August whether Toronto's captain clears 40 in 2026-27 and called it an automatic over, arguing that Matthews has always followed a subpar year with a big one and that this is the year it lands.

Rupp's framing, that Matthews "put the organization on watch" heading into the season, is a talking point. The number underneath it is not. Forty goals is a real, checkable bar, and it is worth doing the arithmetic rather than arguing about vibes, because the answer is genuinely closer than the last two seasons suggest.

Here is our position up front: 40 goals is the correct expectation, not an optimistic one — but only if Matthews plays 75-plus games. Everything about this projection lives and dies on availability, and that is a harder bet than the goal-scoring is.

What actually happened in 2025-26

Matthews played 60 games and finished with 27 goals and 26 assists for 53 points. That is the lowest full-season total of his career. He put 227 shots on net and, in a detail that gets lost, blocked 81 shots — not the profile of a player coasting.

The season ended on March 12 in Anaheim, when a knee-on-knee collision with Ducks defenceman Radko Gudas left him with a Grade 3 MCL tear and a quadriceps contusion. He had surgery and missed Toronto's final 16 games. It was the second consecutive injury-marred campaign for a player who, in 2023-24, scored 69 goals — the most in a season since 1995-96 — and who remains the only player with multiple 60-goal seasons in the salary cap era.

Those two facts sit uncomfortably together, and both are true. Matthews is one of the two or three best goal-scorers of his generation, and he has not been healthy enough to prove it since 2024.

The case for Auston Matthews 40 goals, done with the rate math

Start with what he did rather than what he used to do. Twenty-seven goals in 60 games is 0.45 goals per game. That is a down year by his standards — and it is still a rate that would produce 37 or 38 goals across a full 84-game schedule.

Read that again, because it reframes the entire conversation. Matthews' worst healthy-rate season projects to within three goals of the 40 bar over the longer 2026-27 season. He does not need to rediscover anything. He needs a modest bump — roughly 0.48 goals per game, or one extra goal every three or four weeks — plus a season that does not end in March.

The 84-game schedule is doing quiet work here. Two extra games at his 2025-26 rate is close to a full extra goal. It is not much, but when the question is 37 versus 40, it counts. We laid out how the longer season reshapes the calendar in our look at Toronto's front-loaded October.

The uncomfortable version of the same math: at 60 games, 40 goals requires a 0.67 per-game rate. He has done that. He did it at 0.84 in 2023-24. But asking a player about to turn 29, coming off knee surgery, to score at a career-best rate is a completely different bet than asking him to stay on the ice.

Health is the whole projection

Matthews turns 29 in September. He has had two straight seasons cut short. The most recent one ended with a Grade 3 MCL tear, which is the kind of injury that heals fully with time but reliably costs a player something in the first weeks back.

The information out of Toronto this summer has been thin to the point of frustrating — a smattering of second-hand updates and offseason training sightings, with nothing official. We wrote about that vacuum in our piece on the summer's non-updates, and the fuller recovery picture is in our breakdown of what a bounce-back actually requires.

Nothing reported this summer suggests Matthews is at risk of missing the start of the season. Nothing reported this summer confirms he is fully cleared either. Camp will answer it, and until then any 40-goal projection carries an asterisk that says if healthy in bold.

The supporting cast argument cuts both ways

Rupp's optimism leans partly on Toronto's offseason, and there is something to it. John Chayka rebuilt the roster, Jim Hiller replaced Craig Berube behind the bench, and the Leafs added first-overall pick Gavin McKenna, who will start the season somewhere in the top nine. A genuinely dangerous rookie winger changes how opponents can structure a matchup against Matthews' line.

But the linemate question has haunted this player for years and no one has solved it. The most reliable version remains William Nylander, who is chasing a milestone of his own — we ran that math in our look at Nylander and 50 goals. Splitting the two to balance the lineup is defensible, and it costs Matthews goals. Keeping them together concentrates the offence and leaves the rest of the group thin. Hiller has to pick, and whichever he picks will be second-guessed by December.

There is also the power play, which is where a meaningful share of Matthews' goals have always come from. Darren Raddysh was signed to run a unit from the point — we covered that bet in our analysis of his eight-year deal. If that works, the 40-goal number gets easier. If it does not, Matthews is doing more of it at five-on-five.

What we'd actually bet on

Our number is 41 goals in 76 games. That assumes he misses some time — nearly everyone does over 84 games, and his recent history says he will — and that he scores at a rate slightly better than last year's but well short of his peak.

That would be a very good season and a fairly boring one by the standards of how Toronto discusses Matthews. It would also be enough. This roster does not need a 69-goal season from its captain. It needs the version of him that plays 75 games, wins his matchup, and does not disappear in the spring. The Leafs missed the playoffs last year with him on the shelf for the run-in. Availability is worth more to this team than any individual scoring record.

The bear case is straightforward and should not be dismissed: a player two years removed from his last healthy season, coming off knee surgery, on a team with a new coach and a reshuffled top six, does not automatically snap back. Thirty-two goals in 68 games is every bit as plausible as 41 in 76, and it would send a very different message about what Toronto is.

Why the number matters beyond this season

There is a contract shadow over all of this. Matthews' deal runs through 2027-28, and the salary cap is projected to keep climbing — we worked through the implications in our piece on what his next contract could cost. A 40-goal season resets that conversation. A second straight injury-shortened year makes it the most difficult negotiation Chayka will face.

You can track the whole cap picture on our contracts page as the season develops.

What's next

Camp opens next month and the first real answer comes then — not from a scrimmage line rush but from whether Matthews is a full participant from day one. Watch for that before you watch anything else.

Rupp is not wrong to set the bar at 40. He is just setting it in the easier place. The hard question is not whether Auston Matthews can score 40 goals. He has scored 60 twice. The question is whether he can play 80 games, and nobody — including the Maple Leafs — can answer that in August.