On the eve of the Montreal Canadiens' opening game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, both teams are expected to show up with a lineup weakened by absences. While Carey Price, Joel Edmundson, Sami Niku, Mike Hoffman and Paul Byron will all be absent for Montreal, star forward Auston Matthews and teammate Ilya Mikheyev are expected to miss for Toronto.
However, things may have changed for the Leafs' number 34. A video is currently circulating on the Web, in which we can see Auston Matthews taking several extremely good one timer shots.
Could the Maple Leafs have a major surprise in store for the CH for tomorrow's game? One thing is for sure, Matthews doesn't seem to be injured in any way on this video, which would mean that he is ready to return to action for tomorrow's game.
Even if Dominique Ducharme's team proved, during the last playoffs, that they were capable of beating the Leafs, the possible presence of Matthews is enough to scare the Tricolore fans. The American has never scored less than 34 goals in a season since he entered the NHL and he hit the target 41 times in only 52 games during the 2020-21 season.
In short, we won't know until tomorrow if Matthews is really unavailable, or if he will take part in the game against the Habs, but considering the power of the shots he is able to take in practice, there is definitely something wrong with this story...
