Leafs star Auston Matthews is on a ridiculous shots on goal pace this year

Toronto Maple Leafs star Auston Matthews is quietly chasing an NHL record.

During Saturday’s game against the Minnesota Wild, Matthews became just the fifth NHL player in history to open the season with hat tricks in back-to-back games.

Matthews was held scoreless in last night’s contest against the Chicago Blackhawks, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying: he fired eight different pucks at his opponent’s net.

But whether he scores or not, he’s actually on pace to break the single-season record for shots on goal.

His 21 shots on goal this season lead the NHL, at a remarkable rate of seven shots a night through three games.

Through Matthews’ first five years with the Leafs, he hit a total of eight shots in a game just nine times, but he’s already hit that mark twice in three games to begin this season.

The all-time single-season mark is held by Boston Bruins’ Phil Esposito, who put up an astounding 550 shots in the 1970-71 season en route to 76 regular season goals in 78 games, a rate of 7.05 per game.

If Matthews stayed in the lineup every night and averaged seven shots on net per game, he’d end the year with 574 shots on net. Esposito averaged 7.5 shots at home compared to 6.6 on the road, perhaps suggesting that he got a little hometown bump from the Boston scorekeeper juicing the numbers here and there.

The two closest marks since Esposito’s record-setting season both come from Alex Ovechkin, who hit 528 and 446 in 2008-09 and 2007-08 respectively, where he potted totals of 56 and 65 goals. Ovechkin’s best year came at a mark of 6.68 shots per game, which Matthews is currently pacing ahead of.

Of course, it might be a little ridiculous to extrapolate a full season total out of a three-game sample, and expecting Matthews to hit 550 shots on goal isn’t a realistic expectation.

Matthews’ recent career marks suggest he’s more likely to end his season with somewhere between four to five shots per game, the same range he’s been in each of the last four years with the Leafs.

The year he set the single-season record, Esposito had 10 or more shots on 15 different occasions, a mark Matthews has hit only five times in his entire career.

But 400 might be in sight, most recently done by Boston’s David Pastrnak in 2022-23, which works out to 4.96 shots per game. Just nine players in NHL history have hit the 400-shot mark, although Matthews has likely as good a chance as anyone else to be the next star player to do so.

In any case, it’ll be fascinating to see whatever number Matthews does end up with. And if he does end up somehow breaking Esposito’s record, well, you heard it here first.

(All stats via Hockey-Reference.)

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