Auston Matthews Hart Trophy Ranking: A Bet on His Knee

The Auston Matthews Hart Trophy ranking is about availability, not ability

The Auston Matthews Hart Trophy case just got a number attached to it: Daily Faceoff put Matthews seventh on its list of the top 10 Hart Trophy candidates for 2026-27, and the reaction in Toronto split predictably between insulted and indifferent. Both readings miss what the ranking is actually saying. Matt Larkin's list is not a talent ranking. It is a probability ranking, and Matthews' probability has been damaged by two straight seasons that ended early.

Connor McDavid sits first. Nathan MacKinnon is second after leading the NHL in goals. Macklin Celebrini is in the mix at 20 years old, and Matthew Schaefer lands eighth. Matthews at seventh is the highest-placed Maple Leaf and the only player on that list whose case rests almost entirely on a medical question rather than a hockey one.

That distinction matters, because it changes what Leafs fans should be watching for in October.

The two seasons that built this ranking

Matthews played 60 games in 2025-26 and produced 27 goals and 26 assists for 53 points. The season ended on March 19 at Scotiabank Arena, when a knee-on-knee collision with Anaheim defenceman Radko Gudas produced a Grade 3 tear of his medial collateral ligament and a bruised quadriceps. He had surgery in New York, the club set the recovery timeline at roughly 12 weeks, and he missed Toronto's final 16 games.

It was the second consecutive campaign cut short. The year before, a nagging upper-body issue limited him and, more to the point, limited what he could do when he did play. Two seasons, two truncated years, and a scoring rate that has come down from the absurd peak of 2023-24.

A voter filling out a Hart ballot in June is not evaluating a 60-game season against an 80-game one on a per-game basis. They are looking at who carried a team from October to April. Matthews has not done that since 2023-24, and no amount of talent argues around it.

The Hart is a narrative award and Toronto's narrative is complicated

Here is the part nobody in Toronto likes hearing: the Hart Trophy has historically gone to the best player on a team that is winning, and it has gone disproportionately to players whose value is easy to describe in one sentence. McDavid is "the best player alive." MacKinnon is "the goal leader." Celebrini is "the 20-year-old taking over the league."

Matthews' one-sentence case used to be "he scores more goals than anyone since Ovechkin." That sentence stopped being available when he stopped hitting 60. We laid out what a realistic goal target looks like for him now, and 40 is a good season, not a Hart season.

There is also the team problem. Toronto missed the playoffs in 2025-26. Hart voters do not reward the best player on a lottery team, and they rarely reward the best player on a bubble team either. If the Leafs finish sixth in the Atlantic, Matthews could score 50 and finish eighth in balloting. If Toronto wins the division, a 45-goal season might be enough.

What actually changed in his favour

Daily Faceoff's own note on Matthews is the interesting part: a new head coach and the chance to focus more on offence could work in his favour. That is a real argument, not a throwaway.

Craig Berube's Toronto asked Matthews to be a two-way centre first, and he was excellent at it — genuinely one of the best defensive forwards in the league in stretches. It also cost him. Jim Hiller arrives from Los Angeles with a different set of priorities and a roster built to defend without leaning on its first-line centre, which is the entire point of spending $25 million on four defencemen.

If Hiller's structure lets Matthews attack more and check less, the raw counting numbers should go up. Add a power play with Darren Raddysh quarterbacking from the point and a genuine finishing threat in Gavin McKenna working the flanks, and the offensive environment around Matthews is better than it has been in two years.

The honest opinion: seventh is generous

This is where we part company with the ranking, and not in the direction Leafs fans want.

Seventh implies a meaningful chance. On a strict probability basis, a player who has finished each of the last two seasons on a table is a longer shot than that, regardless of how good he is when healthy. The MCL was a Grade 3 tear requiring surgery, not a tweak. Knees are the injury that changes how a power forward plays, and Matthews' game has always been built on a heavy, low-centre-of-gravity release that starts from his legs.

We are not predicting decline. We are saying the ranking prices in a return to full health that has not been demonstrated yet, and that the first 20 games will tell us more than any summer list can. The summer skating video out of Arizona State looked fine, which is worth exactly what summer skating video is ever worth: something, but not much.

The counterargument is also fair. Matthews turns 29 in September. That is not old for a centre, it is the back half of prime, and players with his shot do not lose it suddenly. A clean 84 games and he is a 50-goal candidate again. The list is betting on that. We would want to see November first.

No other Maple Leaf is close, and that is its own problem

Matthews is the only Toronto player on the list. That is not a snub of anyone else; it is an accurate description of where this roster's star power sits.

William Nylander is the closest thing to a second candidate, and his case is the mirror image of Matthews': he plays every night, he produces at an elite clip, and he has never been framed as the player who carries a team. Hart voters do not reward consistency without a narrative hook, and "scores 40 goals and never misses a game" is a description of a great player rather than a most valuable one.

Matthew Knies is the interesting name over a three-year horizon. He is on the best contract on the team, he is entering his prime, and his game — heavy, net-front, increasingly skilled — is exactly the type that gets described in awards copy. He is not a 2026-27 candidate. He could be a 2028-29 one.

The structural point is that Toronto's summer was spent building depth rather than adding a second superstar. That is defensible roster construction and it is also why the MVP conversation in this market runs through one surgically repaired knee.

What Toronto actually needs from him

Not a Hart Trophy. The Leafs need Matthews to play 75-plus games and be the best player on the ice in April, a month in which he has now spent two straight seasons watching.

That is the whole assignment, and it is why the individual-award conversation is a distraction from the useful one. A healthy Matthews who scores 42 and plays every night is worth more to this team than a 55-goal season that ends on March 19. The organization spent its entire summer — including a full overhaul of its sport performance department — acting like it believes exactly that.

What's next

Camp opens in September and Matthews' medical status will be the first question asked of Hiller and of Chayka. Toronto has been unusually quiet on the specifics all summer, which we flagged when we wrote about the information vacuum around his recovery.

The real checkpoints: how much he plays in preseason, whether he is on the top power-play unit from day one, and how he looks in the back-to-back sets in late October. The Leafs open September 29 against Montreal and close on April 10 at Madison Square Garden. Everything about Matthews' 2026-27 — Hart list or not — depends on being available for the second half of that stretch.

Track the Atlantic race on our standings page and the full roster picture on the players page.