Auston Matthews Is Hurt And The Maple Leafs Are Burnt Toast

This has been in almost all ways a foul season for the Toronto Maple Leafs. They are Canada's daily media poison in the same ways that the Lakers, Cowboys, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and the Dodgers' payroll are America's, and offer similarly scant nutritional value. But clearly, if anyone involved wanted to change our consumption diets, we would have at least stopped eating that second bowl of ice cream by now. And say this much for the latest edition of Leafs Institutional Misery: It has been busy. Toronto's season has been a cavalcade of hope-turned-to-manure almost since Canadian Thanksgiving, to the point where the wheels of their nine-year streak of underachieving in the playoffs had come off the wagon entirely, and in the worst imaginable way. From Jan. 12 through yesterday, they had gone 4-12-4, and hadn't won a single game against an American-based team. Since the National Hockey League is 78 percent American, this presents a real mathematical challenge to glory, with the result being that this Leafs season has been abandoned and the arguments about it have morphed into how many people at multiple organizational levels must be fired for cause, and what specific star they should be fired into. Their talent level has been mocked, their basic team structure besmirched, even their molecular GAF has been shamed. To satisfy an incandescent fan base and begin the desperately needed rebuild, something is going to need to be done, mostly to someone else. That does not separate the Leafs from any other forlorn team, of course, and as a result Thursday night's game against Anaheim held minimal interest and emitted minimal significance—until it very much did. The unimportant part is that the Leafs won, 6-4, to break an eight-game losing streak, which in its own way is another bad result for those who support the idea of a catastrophic bottom-out for the sake of draft lottery odds and getting a jump-start on the reconstruction work ahead. But under the theory that you can still have your house catch fire when it rains, this win was way worse than that. That's because the team's captain and best player, Auston Matthews, had his knee crushed on an open-ice knee-to-knee hit from Anaheim's notorious troublemaker Radko Gudas. This takes the worst-case scenario and turbocharges it.