The Toronto Maple Leafs will have to wait a little longer for Auston Matthews to return as they continue their push for the Stanley Cup.
On the other hand, the New York Islanders are running out of time to start winning and avoid a possible breakup of the team that made it to the NHL semifinals in 2020-21.
The Maple Leafs and Islanders will wrap up a home-and-home series on Thursday night, with Toronto visiting New York in Elmont, N.Y.
Both teams had a break on Wednesday after Toronto beat the Islanders 3-1 on Tuesday. David Kampf, Steven Lorentz, and John Tavares scored for the Maple Leafs in the win.
With the victory, the Maple Leafs tied the Florida Panthers for first place in the Atlantic Division and improved to 2-3-0 in the games Matthews has missed due to an upper-body injury. Matthews has been out since he aggravated the injury in a 6-3 win over the Buffalo Sabres on Dec. 20. He’s missed 14 of Toronto’s 38 games this season.
While Matthews will not play Thursday, he did practice with the team on Wednesday and hopes to see more improvement in the coming days. However, he admitted that he wasn’t sure if he would fully recover even with more rest.
“It’s tricky with these things sometimes,” Matthews said. “It’s a physical sport. It’s a contact sport. Things happen out there sometimes that are out of your control. Just try to manage it as best as I can, and that we can, and you just go from there.”
The Maple Leafs have had a hard time replacing Matthews’ high level of play. He scored 69 goals last season, the most by an NHL player since Mario Lemieux’s 69 in the 1995-96 season.
Toronto had 118 goals as of Wednesday, which ranked 13th in the NHL, down from leading the Eastern Conference last season with 298 goals. Without Matthews, the Maple Leafs have scored three goals or fewer in nine games, including four of their last five.
For the Islanders, offense has been a problem even with the return of first-liners Mathew Barzal and Anthony Duclair in December. The two players have missed a combined 49 games due to injuries but have scored just one goal each in the five games they’ve played together since Dec. 21. In that stretch, the Islanders have a 2-3-0 record.
New York scored six goals to beat Toronto 6-4 on Dec. 21 and another six in a win over the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday. However, they’ve only scored four goals in their three losses since then.
The Islanders, who had 102 goals as of Wednesday, were tied for the seventh fewest in the NHL. They have won back-to-back games only twice this season and ended the year five points out of a playoff spot.
If their struggles continue into 2025, free agents like Brock Nelson and Kyle Palmieri, as well as Anders Lee and Jean-Gabriel Pageau (who each have one year left on their contracts after this season), could become trade targets for teams looking to add to their roster.
“We’re worried about just winning games and clawing ourselves back into it and not thinking about the opposite,” said Nelson. “We want to get off to a good start in the new year. We’ve been talking about getting on a roll and just playing good, solid hockey and getting a good stretch of wins to get ourselves back more in the mix, so that’s the main focus.”
