Can Auston Matthews Help Bring Beautiful Hockey Back to the NHL?

I remember where I was when I saw the great Russian hockey phenom Alex Ovechkin score that impossible, twisting goal from his back in January 2006, his rookie season. I was eating breakfast watching SportsCenter before school (back When I Was A Kid SportsCenter showed sports highlights instead of people talking) when holy shit, that goal. A random breakfast forever etched in my memory.

My jaw dropped with such suddenness that milk from my cereal began to dribble down my jaw. I just sat there, watching the replay over and over, allowing myself to become a disgusting human slob, and not caring because holy shit holy shit did you see that fucking goal?!

Almost a decade later, on Wednesday night, another rookie, 19-year-old Auston Matthews, the first overall pick in last year's draft playing in his very first NHL game, scored a goal, too— an NHL record four them in fact, the most every by a rookie making his debut. But there was one that stood out, his second of the night:

It was different goal from Ovechkin's. Matthews had to work harder to gain possession—and to keep it—and he went through a greater number of defenders en route to the net. Still, both plays featured ultra-talented first-overall picks doing what few rookies have the wherewithal to even consider, eschewing positional soundness to follow a hunch and make a play. Ovechkin moved high to pressure the point man, who fumbled the puck. He then tried to straight muscle his way through a defender who had good positioning before getting knocked down and then shooting with his stick over his head while rolling on the ice and facing away from goal. For his goal, Matthews tirelessly stick-lifted two Senators, including former Norris Trophy winner Erik Karlsson, before slipping the puck past the goalie. Most rookies playing their first game don't have that kind of aggressiveness, or the talent to make something of it.

I watched the GIF of Matthews' goal on Twitter over and over before it got taken down for copyright infringement (sports-viewing sure has changed in the last decade). Then I found another GIF (it got taken down too).

We can't say for sure if Matthews' brilliance was an aberration, but I'm betting it wasn't. As for Ovechkin, he went on to score 52 goals his rookie year, and 473 since, including this one:

And this one:

And this one:

And this one:

To be clear, Matthews and Ovechkin are not the same player. Ovechkin is a left winger and has about 20 pounds on the rookie center. But, even just from watching the World Cup of Hockey and his first game, Matthews seems to belong to the old Soviet style that emphasizes creativity and freedom of movement. The great Russian hockey player Igor Larionov, writing in the Players Tribune, recalled that "we wanted to improvise and create and play the game in a beautiful way that would make the crowd get up out of their seats and applaud."

I can think of no better way to describe the goals above, especially Matthews's. His stick lift on Karlsson, the speed and grace with which he snags the puck out from under him, is the kind of thing I can watch hundreds of times and never tire because it's just so damn beautiful. And I'm guessing other fans think the same thing too, which is a very good thing for the NHL.

Every sport hopes for more of these players, the kind who don't just play the game well, but also do so with style and flare that demands constant attention. But the NHL has struggled to find these types of players. Legendary center Pavel Datsyuk was one of those players, but he recently departed Detroit, where he played for 15 years, for the Kontinental Hockey League, which is primarily based in Russia. During the World Cup of Hockey, he told reporters, "There are not many creative players now [in the NHL]. It's less and less every year. There's lots of talent, but teams are playing more systems."

In the Players Tribune, Larionov ruminated on why this is: "If you look at the coaches in Juniors and minor league hockey, many of them were not skill players. It's a lot of former enforcers and grinders who take these coaching jobs. Naturally, they tell their players to be just like them…We lose a lot of Pavel Datsyuks to the closed-minded nature of the AHL and NHL."

Still, there are a few North American players who Larionov said capture the "Soviet spirit": Johnny Gaudreau, Patrick Kane, and Jonathan Toews "to name a few."

Some might point to the fact that Matthews played a lot of sports in his native Scottsdale, Arizona, an extremely-nontraditional hockey market where he learned to play hockey outside of the traditional North American bubble. Maybe there's something to that. However it came to be, Matthews has arrived.

More significantly, his talent is not being quashed under the demands of a system. At least initially, it appears he's free to play, like so few players are. (It's probably not a coincidence that Datsyuk's coach for most of his career, Mike Babcock, is now Matthews's coach.) This will not only be good for his goal tally, but for all of us. We'll be watching and waiting for more moments like Wednesday. They will come. And it'll be fun.