Auston Matthews answers questions regarding absences from first round

Auston Matthews played all 82 games for the Toronto Maple Leafs during the regular season, and then, as quickly as he scored his Maple Leaf single-season record-breaking sixty-nine regular-season goals, he disappeared intermittently from the lineup during the team's first-round matchup with the Boston Bruins, but now there's a clear answer as to why.

Matthews, who spoke to the media on Monday, acknowledged that he had been sick for part of the series, which he played through during game three.

As luck would have it, he took a weird hit, which caused him to miss games five and six. However, he returned for game seven.




It is unclear during which play Matthews may have been injured; however, one could speculate that the hit by Charlie McAvoy during game four was the culprit and lines up with Matthews missing the following two games.


The secrecy surrounding injury has been part of the game for as long as it's been around, and suggesting he was ill may have been the ideal cover-up for another injury that may have happened late in the season (game 82) or sometime during the early part of the series against the Bruins. It's likely that we'll never know what happened, and, too be honest, although we probably deserve to know, it's nobody's business.

Long story short, if Matthews was dealing with an illness and any other ailments, the a doctor was advising him on it and ultimately felt in their expert opinion that they could at least gave him the go-ahead to participate in game seven.