Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner did not team up to silence anybody on Tuesday night. Matthews did his part, scoring with 14 seconds left in overtime and adding three assists as Toronto erased a 3-0 hole to beat Nashville 5-4 at Scotiabank Arena. Marner was nowhere near it. He plays for the Vegas Golden Knights now, where he spent last season and skated in the 2026 Stanley Cup Final, a six-game loss to Carolina. If you watched this game and came away talking about Marner setting up goals, you watched a different sport.
The player who mattered was on the ice. Matthews scored the overtime winner on a rebound of a William Nylander shot, the finish of a player who looks like the reason this team builds around him. He added three assists in regulation. That's the version of Matthews people spend summers worrying has gone quiet. For one night, he answered all of it.
The best story belonged to a rookie. Gavin McKenna scored his first NHL goal, picked up his first NHL assist, and walked off as the game's first star. A rookie outshining the captain's heroics in his first NHL game that mattered is the kind of thing that makes a cold October Tuesday feel like it mattered.
Toronto spotted Nashville a 3-0 lead. Steven Stamkos scored twice, Nils Hoglander scored twice, and the Predators looked like the harder-working team for two periods against a team that was supposed to be chasing them off the ice at home. This was Toronto's fourth game of the season, and every single one has been decided by a single goal. A team that can't stop bleeding for the first forty minutes and then wins on late-game talent is riding luck, and it's thrilling to watch, but it's no measure of how good this team actually is.
There's also a nice twist the revenge-tour crowd ignores. Ryan O'Reilly, a former Leaf, hit his 900th career point in this game for Nashville and was singled out by his own coach afterward. The ex-Toronto player who showed up and played well was wearing the other team's sweater.
Matthews proved the doubters wrong. The defense that handed Nashville three goals did not, and one overtime goal in game four won't hush it. Enjoy the comeback, it was genuinely great television. Just leave Mitch Marner out of it, because he was busy being a Golden Knight.
