Auston Matthews Speed: 35.1 km/h in His First Game Back Is the Number That Matters

Auston Matthews Hit 35.1 km/h in His First Game in Six Months

The Auston Matthews speed number from Saturday night is the most encouraging piece of information the Maple Leafs have produced all month. In his first game since March 12, in a split-squad preseason game against Montreal at Scotiabank Arena, Matthews took the puck end to end in the first period and was clocked at 35.1 kilometres per hour.

That is not a round number picked for a headline. It is a threshold, and it matters because of how rarely Matthews has crossed it in recent years. Over the past three seasons he has not recorded more than three bursts above 35 km/h in a single campaign. In 2025-26 he did it twice. The last season in which he cleared it more than three times was 2022-23.

He did it once, in September, in a preseason game, four days after his first full practice with a new coaching staff. One data point is one data point. But this is the specific data point that the entire 2026-27 season was waiting on.

What Actually Happened to Matthews

The 2025-26 season ended for Matthews on March 12 with a Grade 3 medial collateral ligament tear that required surgery. A Grade 3 MCL is a complete tear of the ligament, the most severe classification, and it ended a season that had already been interrupted.

The knee, though, is not the whole story and arguably not even the main one. Matthews spent the better part of two seasons managing a back issue that never fully resolved and that limited him in ways that showed up in exactly this kind of tracking data. Explosiveness is the first thing a compromised back takes away from a skater. It is also the thing that made Matthews, at his peak, a player who could beat NHL defencemen wide from a standing start.

The knee surgery, in a strange way, may have helped. A forced offseason of structured rehabilitation is not something a player of Matthews’s status usually gets. He came out of it, by his own description, feeling as good as he has in a long time — and he was clear afterward that he thought he had shaken off the rust quickly.

The Rest of the Night Backed It Up

The speed burst was not an isolated highlight. Matthews finished the split-squad game with an assist on Darren Raddysh’s goal and six shots. Toronto lost the game, and lost the other half of the split squad in Montreal too, but nobody in the organization was watching the scoreboard.

Six shots in a preseason game from a player who had not played in six months is a volume number that suggests he was hunting his own offence rather than easing in. Combined with a top speed he had not reached in years, it is the profile of a player whose body is cooperating.

The assist is worth noting for a different reason. Raddysh is the new defenceman Toronto signed to shoot pucks, and Hiller has since paired him with Morgan Rielly and said he wants that pair on the ice with the top-six forwards. The Matthews-to-Raddysh connection in a September exhibition is a preview of the structure the coaching staff is trying to build.

The Summer Toronto Told Us Almost Nothing

Context matters here, because the organization spent four months saying as little as possible. Matthews’s rehabilitation was conducted largely out of view. The public got fragments — video of him skating at a pro camp, reports of shooting sessions overseas — and very little from the club itself, which is how an information vacuum forms around a franchise player.

John Chayka, in his first summer as general manager, eventually gave Matthews a public green light heading into camp, but the language was careful and the timeline was never specified. That vagueness was reasonable from a management perspective and maddening from a fan perspective, and it is precisely why a tracked speed figure from a real game carries so much weight. Nobody has to interpret 35.1 km/h.

It is also worth remembering how thin Toronto’s margin for error is. This is a club that missed the playoffs, fired its coach, changed general managers, and won the draft lottery — and then spent the summer adding depth rather than star power. A healthy Matthews is not a bonus on top of that plan. He is the plan.

Why the Auston Matthews Speed Number Is the Right Thing to Watch

NHL Edge tracking has made speed the most legible public indicator of a skater’s physical condition, and the 35 km/h mark is roughly where elite NHL burst speed begins. Most forwards never reach it. The ones who do reach it a handful of times a season.

For Matthews specifically, it is diagnostic rather than descriptive. He has never been a player whose game depended on top speed the way Connor McDavid’s does. He is a shooter, a puck protector, and one of the best players in the world at creating a half-second of separation in tight. But the ability to hit 35 is a proxy for whether his lower body is generating full force, and full force is what makes the rest of it work.

Track it across the remaining preseason games and the first month of the regular season. If Matthews clears 35 km/h three or four times by American Thanksgiving, he is healthy in a way he has not been since 2022-23, and Toronto’s offensive projection changes materially. If Saturday was the only time, it was adrenaline.

What This Means for the Maple Leafs Season

Toronto’s 2026-27 projection is a strange animal: public models rate the skater group as one of the two most improved in the league and the goaltending as the worst any team took on this summer. The result is a bubble team at roughly 91 points.

Almost every optimistic path through that projection runs through Matthews. A 29-year-old three-time Rocket Richard winner playing at full health is a 50-goal threat, and there is no other player on this roster who can add 15 goals to the team total by himself. The bottom six that John Chayka rebuilt this summer — Nick Paul, Colton Sissons, Jack Roslovic, Teddy Blueger, Brandon Duhaime — is designed to stop bleeding goals, not to score them.

We argued in August that 40 goals is the benchmark that defines Toronto’s season, and nothing about Saturday changes that framing. It just makes it look considerably more achievable than it did in July, when Matthews was still an open question and the organization was being deliberately vague about his rehabilitation.

Our Take

Be measured. One shift in a preseason game against a Montreal split squad does not undo two years of physical decline, and the honest read on Matthews over those two years is that the body has been the issue and the body is not something a good September fixes permanently.

But this is genuinely good news, and LeafsLurker has been sceptical enough about this roster to say so plainly when it happens. The single largest downside risk to Toronto’s season was a captain who could no longer separate from NHL defenders. Saturday was the first hard evidence against that risk since March.

The remaining question is durability, not capability. Matthews has now demonstrated he can still reach the speeds that made him great. Whether he can do it in game 60 of an 84-game schedule, after a winter of matchup minutes, is a question nobody can answer in September.

What’s Next

Toronto has preseason games remaining against Ottawa this week before opening-night rosters are due Sept. 28 and the regular season begins Sept. 29 against Montreal at Scotiabank Arena. Expect Matthews to play at least one more exhibition game, most likely at home.

The number to watch is not points. It is whether the tracking data shows repeat bursts. For more on how Hiller intends to deploy him, see our breakdown of the offensive-zone freedom Matthews is being given this season, and the players page for the full roster.