What History Says About the Maple Leafs’ Tavares-Matthews Captaincy Swap

Just how rare is it for a team to switch from a longstanding captain — and keep the old guy around?

Former Toronto captain John Tavares presents teammate Auston Matthews with his updated jersey as the 26th captain of the Maple Leafs. (Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

August isn’t exactly prime season for hot NHL news, but something fascinating did happen in the hockey world last week: It was announced that John Tavares, who had been the Toronto Maple Leafs’ captain since 2019, would be handing over the “C” to teammate Auston Matthews.

The move is so interesting because it is both rare and not 100% surprising. Players of Tavares’ stature — and tenure as captain — don’t tend to lose the captaincy of a flagship franchise without either being stripped of it, traded, cut or retiring. Very seldom do they willingly cede the honor to a teammate, and then stick around for what’s next. But Tavares did do that, by all accounts, unifying the Leafs’ captaincy with their best player and biggest star in Matthews, making a move that many felt was inevitable in the next few years anyway.

Still, to get a sense for just how uncommon this type of torch-passing is, I scraped Hockey-Reference’s captaincy data for every active franchise, looking for instances where a team switched out a captain who’d previously served at least 5 seasons (like Tavares) and retained that captain for the entirety of the following season. I focused on cases since the 1967 NHL expansion that ended the Original Six era; I also excluded situations such as Eric Lindros and the Flyers in 2000, when the captain was stripped of his role in the middle of the season, or cases like the 2004 Devils — when Scott Niedermayer filled in for the injured Scott Stevens, but Stevens was still officially captain until his retirement.

After filtering the data for all of that, I was left with these 15 comparable historical captain swaps, plus Toronto’s current Tavares-for-Matthews switch:

What happens when teams have a “C” succession?

Here are a few takeaways that jumped out to me:

• Like the 34-year-old Tavares giving way to the 27-year-old Matthews, these are almost always exercises in torch-passing. The average outgoing captain is 32.9 years old while the new captain is 28.6, and roughly three-quarters of the historical switches on the list above involved an older ex-captain handing the reins to a younger player. This makes sense, as teams are often in this situation because they want to transition from a veteran captain to a younger one who will lead them into the future. With a difference of 7 years between them, the Tavares-Matthews switch had a larger age gap than the pre-2025 average (4.0 years).

• Some of these swaps are more amicable than others. A number of the older outgoing captains did it as part of a succession plan or simply the veteran mentoring the new team leader. Rod Langway’s turning over of Washington’s captaincy to Kevin Hatcher is a good example of this (“I hope I’m not disappointing you that I’m not retiring,” Langway joked to the press before expressing his support for Hatcher). And Bobby Clarke lost his Flyers captaincy because rules prohibited wearing the “C” while also serving as assistant coach.
  
  But other instances on the list, such as Dustin Brown with the Kings, saw the former captain left unhappy with the team’s decision. And it’s always awkward when a respected veteran arrives and is named captain over a younger player, like what happened when Rob Blake joined the Sharks and supplanted Patrick Marleau in the role after Marleau had held it for parts of 5 years.

• The new captains tend to be better players. No disrespect to Tavares, but he is coming off his worst season by adjusted Goals Above Replacement (12.5 GAR) since he was a 19-year-old rookie.¹ Matthews, meanwhile, flirted with 70 goals — falling just 1 score short — while vying for MVP honors and producing a career-high 29.4 adjusted GAR. The 16.9-goal gap between Matthews and Tavares last season is the largest for any pairing on our list going into the transition.
  
  But giving the younger, better performer the “C” is just generally one of the recurring themes on our list above. The average incoming captain was worth more GAR the season before the swap — sometimes far more, in the cases like Clarke taking over for Ed Van Impe and Anže Kopitar supplanting Brown — and that gap only tends to widen during the first season of the new arrangement. (Again, perhaps this is related to the fact that most of these cases involve an older ex-captain, who may be past his prime, passing the torch.)

• The team’s performance stays about the same. This was maybe a little surprising to me, although I’m not sure what I was expecting directionally from teams who tended to make these changes. (I could see our sample being good teams who want to get over the hump, like Toronto, or mediocre ones who just want a new voice.) But in terms of the Simple Rating System (SRS), the teams on our list went from +0.39 goals per game on average with the old captain to +0.41 with the new one.
  
  I’m not sure that’s great news for Toronto, who desperately want a different season outcome than the ones they’ve been getting under Tavares’ watch, but I guess it could be worse. (In reality, the team’s solid offseason by net GAR will probably matter a lot more than this largely symbolic captaincy swap.)

• It might signal Tavares’ exit from Toronto. Tavares has said all the right things around this decision, and I don’t have any insider info suggesting he harbors hidden resentments about it. But he is also set for free agency after the 2025 season, which is the final leg of the 7-year , $77 million contract he signed with Toronto in the summer of 2018. And while age 34 isn’t exactly ancient by the standards of a sport that saw Jaromir Jagr play until he was nearly 50, it is older than the average outgoing captain on our list above — plus, many of the veterans in a similar situation ceded their captaincy right before leaving the franchise. So now that he is no longer the Leafs’ captain, it wouldn’t be surprising if Tavares’ time in Toronto was approaching its end as well.

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Filed under: NHL

1. His second season, at age 20 in 2011, also saw him put up 12.5 GAR, the same as he did at age 33 in 2024.