{"id":551469,"date":"2026-03-19T22:29:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T22:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/551469\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T22:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T22:29:08","slug":"matthews-of-maple-leafs-has-knee-surgery-recovery-time-12-weeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/551469\/","title":{"rendered":"Matthews of Maple Leafs has knee surgery, recovery time 12 weeks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Auston Matthews<\/a> had knee surgery on Thursday, and the Toronto Maple Leafs center has an expected recovery time of 12 weeks.<\/p>\n

Matthews sustained a grade 3 MCL tear and quad contusion in his left leg in a knee-on-knee collision with defenseman Radko Gudas<\/a>\u00a0in a 6-4 win against the Anaheim Ducks at Scotiabank Arena on March 12 and the team announced two days later that he would have season-ending surgery.<\/p>\n

The 28-year-old crumpled to the ice when he tried to sidestep the hit in the slot from Gudas, who was assessed a major penalty for kneeing and a game misconduct at 15:47 of the second period. Matthews was helped off the ice by a trainer and teammate Brandon Carlo, putting minimal weight on his left leg.<\/p>\n

Gudas was suspended five games by the NHL Department of Player Safety.<\/p>\n

“Obviously feel for Auston,” Toronto forward John Tavares<\/a>\u00a0said before a 3-2 shootout loss at the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday. “I know how hard he’s been just grinding away trying to play the game at a high level and help this team as best he can and lead the way. … Just want him to get healthy and feel good as soon as possible.”<\/p>\n

Matthews had 53 points (27 goals, 26 assists) in 60 games this season for the Maple Leafs (29-28-12), who are 12 points behind the Detroit Red Wings and Boston Bruins for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Eastern Conference.<\/p>\n

He had already been ruled out for the remainder of the regular season, and the 12-week timeline means Matthews likely would not be able to return barring a lengthy playoff run by Toronto. \u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s tough to lose a guy like that for the year,” Toronto coach Craig Berube said. “Obviously we’re not happy about it; nobody’s happy about it, but we’ve got to move on and get ready to play. I mean, there’s nothing we can do about it now, right?”<\/p>\n

Toronto’s all-time leader with 428 goals, Matthews has 780 points (352 assists) in 689 games. Selected by Toronto with the No. 1 pick in the 2016 NHL Draft, Matthews was named captain of the Maple Leafs prior to the 2024-25 season. He was also the captain for Team USA, which won the gold medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics.<\/p>\n

This is the second season in a row Matthews will be out a significant chunk of time. He missed 15 games last season because of two separate upper-body injuries. He also missed eight games in the 2022-23 season, and nine games in the 2021-22 season. He hasn’t played 82 games in a season since his rookie season in 2016-17,.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Auston Matthews had knee surgery on Thursday, and the Toronto Maple Leafs center has an expected recovery time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-551469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}