Jack Roslovic Got the First Shot at Matthews' Wing. He Has to Earn the Rest

Jack Roslovic and Matthews opened camp together, and that is all it is

Jack Roslovic skated on Auston Matthews' right wing at the first practice of Maple Leafs training camp, with Matthew Knies on the left. It is the most interesting line placement on the roster that does not involve an 18-year-old, and it is also the one most likely to change.

Toronto signed Roslovic to a two-year, $8 million contract on July 1, a $4 million cap hit that runs through 2027-28 — one of many new numbers on our contracts page. That is real money for a team with no cap room, and it was spent on a specific problem: the Maple Leafs have not had a stable right-shot option beside Matthews since Mitch Marner left, and the parade of players tried there last season did not work.

The internal framing around the pairing, as best as can be read from the first day, is experimental rather than settled. Put him there, see what it looks like, adjust. That is the right way to treat it and the right way to write about it. This is not a solution announced. It is a hypothesis being tested with four preseason games of runway.

The case for Roslovic is better than the shrug it got in July

The signing was received unenthusiastically, which was an overcorrection. Roslovic has scored 20 or more goals in three of the past five seasons, including each of the last two. He is a right shot. And by the NHL's own tracking data he is genuinely fast — Edge had him in the 93rd percentile league-wide for speed bursts above 20 miles per hour last season.

Those three attributes, in combination, describe almost exactly what Matthews has lacked on his off wing. Matthews does not need a winger to create his offence. He needs one who can keep up in transition, occupy the far side of the ice, and finish the looks that come from defences collapsing on him. Roslovic can do all three on his best nights.

There is also the history. Roslovic and Matthews were teammates at the U.S. National Team Development Program more than a decade ago, where they finished first and second in team scoring on a loaded roster. Matthews spoke about the reunion at media day with more enthusiasm than he typically brings to roster questions. Chemistry from 2014 does not produce goals in 2026, but familiarity does shorten the adjustment period, and a 13-day camp does not offer much of one.

The case against is the part nobody wants to say

Roslovic has been a very good complementary player on good teams and an ordinary one on bad ones. He has moved around a lot. He has been a top-six forward in stretches and a third-liner in others, sometimes within the same season. That pattern describes a player whose production is highly dependent on his situation — which is not a criticism so much as a description of what $4 million buys.

The specific risk with Matthews is defensive. Matthews' line will draw the hardest available matchups on many nights unless Jim Hiller can successfully offload that work to the Cowan-Paul-Sissons matchup line. Roslovic has never been a defensively reliable winger. If the third line cannot take the hard minutes, the Matthews line's underlying numbers will be a problem, and Roslovic will be the easiest place to assign blame.

Toronto gave up 299 goals last season. A top line that trades chances is not what this roster needs, however many Matthews scores.

What $4 million buys on this roster

Context matters on the contract. Toronto did not have the cap space to sign a legitimate first-line right wing this summer, and it did not have the trade capital to acquire one without moving pieces it needed elsewhere. John Chayka's first offseason was spent on volume and structure: Roslovic, Colton Sissons, Nick Paul via trade from Tampa Bay, Darren Raddysh on the blue line, Sergei Bobrovsky in net.

None of those are stars. All of them are players who fill a defined hole at a price the club could absorb. That is a coherent strategy for a team whose two most expensive forwards are locked in and whose most important asset is an 18-year-old on an entry-level contract.

Judged against that standard — a $4 million winger, not a $10 million one — Roslovic is a reasonable bet. The mistake would be judging him against what Toronto used to have on that wing. He is not that player and was never signed to be.

Matthews is the variable that matters more

There is a version of this where Roslovic is fine and the line still does not work, because Matthews does not return to form. That is the larger question hanging over Toronto's season, and it has nothing to do with his winger.

Matthews arrived at camp healthy after an injury-disrupted campaign and said his intent was always to be in Toronto, which ended a summer of speculation. He took public ownership of last season's failure at media day, as did John Tavares. Chayka, for his part, has said he hopes the Matthews contract ends in retirement rather than a trade — Matthews has two years left at $13.25 million and becomes eligible to extend on July 1, 2027.

A healthy, motivated Matthews makes almost any competent winger look good. A diminished one makes even a well-constructed line look ordinary. Roslovic's evaluation is entangled with that in a way that is genuinely unfair to him and completely unavoidable.

Our take: this works or it doesn't, and we will know by November

The honest read is that Roslovic is the third-best option Toronto could have deployed there and the best one it could afford. Gavin McKenna is the most talented winger on the roster and he is 18, which is why he opened with John Tavares and William Nylander rather than with Matthews. Nylander himself would be the obvious answer, and we have argued before that Hiller should be willing to put those two together when a game demands it. He has instead chosen to spread the offence across two lines, which is defensible and probably correct over 84 games.

That leaves Roslovic with the job. He should get it for the full preseason and the first 15 to 20 games of the regular season, because anything shorter is not a real evaluation. If it is not producing by American Thanksgiving, the answer is not another depth winger — it is McKenna moving up and Tavares taking Roslovic.

The one thing Toronto should not do is what it did last season, which was rotate a new player through that spot every two weeks and learn nothing about any of them.

What Roslovic actually has to prove

Three things, in order. That he can finish the chances Matthews generates at a rate that justifies top-line minutes — somewhere north of 20 goals with that usage. That he can enter the offensive zone with control rather than dumping, because his speed is only useful if it produces possession. And that he can be neutral defensively, which is a lower bar than good and still a bar he has not always cleared.

Knies helps with the third one. He is the line's physical presence and its most reliable puck retriever, and a Knies-Matthews-Roslovic unit has a fairly clear division of labour: Knies wins it back, Matthews makes the decision, Roslovic gets open. That is a coherent line on paper.

On paper is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Maple Leafs have had a great many coherent-on-paper lines since 2017.

What's next

Saturday's split-squad games against Montreal give the first real look, with one half of the roster at Scotiabank Arena and the other at the Bell Centre. Watch whether Hiller keeps the Knies-Matthews-Roslovic trio together for meaningful minutes or breaks it up to look at other combinations — a coach protecting a line in exhibition play is a coach who believes in it. Toronto opens the regular season against the Canadiens on September 29, and the Jack Roslovic and Matthews experiment gets its first honest verdict somewhere around American Thanksgiving.