Brad Treliving stands by Auston Matthews’ decision to play through injury at end-of-year media day

Now that the Toronto Maple Leafs’ season is dead and gone, it’s time to get clarity on key questions that were avoided throughout the year.

One of the main questions surrounding the 2024-25 Maple Leafs: what really happened to Auston Matthews this year?

Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving held his end-of-year media availability Thursday, where he was inevitably asked about Matthews’ health, and why he wasn’t held out longer in order to get back to 100 percent for the postseason. Treliving mostly offered more of what we’ve already heard, but added management’s perspective on why he kept playing through this unknown injury.

“In Auston’s case, he injured himself in camp. We’re never going to put a player in a position where it’s going to make it worse. He worked through it. It’s not a case of us saying ‘Auston, get out there and make it worse.’ He got time. When we said it was day-to-day, we really believed that,” Treliving said.

“He was able to play through it. When he came back and started playing after times off, it was better. There were times where it would flare up. He was able to play with it. It wasn’t something we felt like playing, he was going to put himself in a really bad position short or long-term.”

Treliving spoke about respecting individual players’ right to decide how much they share, lining up his comments with as much as Matthews told media on May 20.

“It’s a very tough season, I don’t need to get into the specifics of stuff, but it happened to me in training camp, obviously wasn’t feeling great for the first month or so of the season,” Matthews said. “I took some time off, went to Germany, all of these things to try and feel better, than, you know, just kind of in a place that I felt like I could manage it.”

Through his injury, Matthews played 67 games during the regular season, registering 33 goals and 78 points. While he was still over a point-per-game player, it was a significant drop-off for the star forward, following up his career-high 69 goals last season with a career-low of 33. And then, of course, there was the matter of the postseason, where he seemed snakebitten once again in getting on the scoresheet.

Regardless of his injury, Treliving still gave him kudos for his leadership after taking over the captaincy from John Tavares last summer.

“I give Auston all the credit in the world,” he said. “I thought he had a really good year in terms of his first year as captain.”

With the offseason to rest and reset, Matthews said last week that he expects to be back to full health come this October. While it doesn’t seem like we’ll get any more information on the injury itself anytime soon, we’ll just have to hope his prognosis comes true and he finds his game again come next season.