Down Goes Brown's Grab Bag: Auston Matthews, and Why It's OK for Fans to Overreact

(Editor's note: Welcome to Sean McIndoe's weekly grab bag, where he writes on a variety of NHL topics. You can follow him on Twitter.)

The third star: The NHL freaks out over Auston Matthews—So the first overall pick from this year's draft played his first regular-season game on Wednesday, and it went pretty well. Matthews scored four goals, the best debut game in the modern history of the league. And while Maple Leafs fans responded calmly and rationally, the rest of the NHL couldn't quite say the same.

Siri: when do we play the Leafs?

— ColumbusBlueJackets (@BlueJacketsNHL)October 13, 2016

I feel like I'm watching one of the 99 overall created player's I used to make in NHL 2002

— Garret Sparks (@GSparks40)October 13, 2016

Would pay money to see Austin Matthews DM's right now.

— Paul Bissonnette (@BizNasty2point0)October 13, 2016

What's the big deal I scored 4 goals…..In my career. — Frazer Mclaren (@Frazermclaren68)October 13, 2016

I've just decided that Reims will play ALL of the games versus the leafs this year…… — Strombone (@strombone1)October 13, 2016

Join us next week as we track the NHL's reaction to Matthews' inevitable ACL tear.

The second star: Kevin Bieksa goes undercover—I have to be honest, the whole "disguise a player" genre is getting kind of tired. But turning it around on his teammates instead of some helpless fans was an inspired choice.

With his team playing in a recent preseason game, — Anaheim Ducks (@AnaheimDucks)October 11, 2016

Yeah, he had me at "beep beep, Coyotes."

The first star: The Bobby Nicks Burger—God bless the Oilers. If you're a hockey fan in need of a laugh, they're the gift that just keeps giving. Recently, we all enjoyed their terrifying new mascot. Then came their painfully awkward captaincy unveiling that led to boy band-themed hashtag fun. And this week, the hockey world discovered a weeks-old blog post in which the Oilers are very proud of themselves for, well, inventing a hamburger.

Not an Onion article. Oiler exec. made up a burger for the new rink, named it after himself — Kent Wilson (@Kent_Wilson)October 12, 2016

You really have to read the entire press release to fully appreciate the absurdity of it all, but here are a few highlights:

• The idea that anyone would want to eat something designed by an Oilers' executive, ever.

• The image of Bob Nicholson speaking in exclamation points, smiling, and then turning to high five the chef.

• "Creating over four different burgers…" Um, so, five? You can just say five.

• The fact that a press release about a hamburger with lots of different ingredients ends up including a quote from somebody named "Stew MacDonald." I guess whoever was in charge of coming up with the fake names decided that "Casserole Burger King" would have been too on-the-nose.

• The big reveal, after building the whole thing up as some sort of unique culinary creation, that the finished product is actually just "a classic bacon cheeseburger, loaded up with some fresh veggies." So exactly what you get at every other restaurant where you order a hamburger. Awesome.

Please don't stop being funny when Connor McDavid finally makes you good again, Oilers.

The issue: Something happened in a team's first game and now their fans are excited.

The outrage: Let's all point and laugh at these dumb fans who don't seem to understand that the season still has 81 games to go.

Is it justified: No. Stop doing this.

Yes, smart fans don't put much stock in a single game. One game doesn't tell you anything. You need at least 20 games to know anything about a season, and 40 is better. We all understand this.

But we don't have 20 or 40 games. We have one. So that's what we're going to react to. Whether it's Matthews and his four goals, or Erik Karlsson's three points, or the Blues and Sharks starting out with big wins over division rivals, or the Oilers looking fantastic in the Rogers Place opening, it's OK for fans to enjoy something that happens on opening night.

And while we're at it, it's also fine for Flames fans to freak out over Brian Elliott looking like a sieve, or Kings fans to start wondering about the offense, or Leaf fans to wonder if Frederik Anderssen is their latest in a long line of goaltending busts.

Is it all a big overreaction that will probably look silly within a few weeks, if not days? Of course it is. But overreacting is what fans do. It's part of the whole experience. Let us have this.

Nobody actually thinks one game decides an entire season. Tongue-in-cheek jokes aside, nobody really believes Auston Matthews is scoring 328 goals, or that the Oilers are going 82-0, or that the Blackhawks are fatally flawed and headed for last place.

But it's OK for fans to be fans. So save the performative eye rolls and haughty lectures about overreactions, annoying scolds of the hockey world. After all, it's a long season, and you're going to want to pace yourself.

So yeah, that Matthews kid. He's good. But a monster debut doesn't necessarily mean you're bound for the Hall of Fame, as we learned from this week's obscure player: Fabian Brunnstrom.

Brunnstrom is a Swedish winger who went undrafted in the NHL, but gained attention with a strong 2007-08 season in the Swedish Elite League. That sparked a bidding war among NHL teams, including the Maple Leafs and the Canucks. In the end he chose Dallas, signing a two-year deal with the Stars.

Brunnstrom made his NHL debut on Oct. 15, 2008, and it was a good one. He scored three times, making him one of (at the time) just three players to record a hat trick in his first career game. If you're wondering what those three goals looked like set to terrible music, YouTube has you covered.

Unfortunately, that debut would turn out to be the only multi-goal game of Brunnstrom's NHL career. He'd finish the 2008-09 season with 17 goals, but scored just two the following year before spending the 2010-11 campaign in the minors. The Stars eventually traded him to the Maple Leafs, but he never played for Toronto, and a free-agent deal with Detroit resulted in just five games before he headed back to Europe to resume his career. He ended up playing just 104 NHL games, scoring just 19 goals.

As of press time, he had not yet commented on how awesome Auston Matthews is.

This week, the NHL did something right about concussions. Sort of.

We're going to be slapping all sorts of caveats on this one in a second, but let's start with the basics. The NHL officially announced an upgraded concussion protocol this week, one that will see centralized spotters who'll have the power to order players removed from a game until they can pass a medical exam. Those spotters will monitor all games from NHL headquarters in New York, replacing the in-arena ones that were put in place last year and had been criticized as ineffective. Teams that don't remove players promptly will be subject to "a mandatory minimum fine for a first offense, with substantially increased fine amounts for any subsequent offense," according to the league.

These are all good changes, and it's nice to see the league taking significant steps to address a serious issue. With Sidney Crosby sidelined yet again, the timing was right to remind fans that the league takes this seriously.

That said, here come those caveats. The first, and move obvious, is that all of this should have been done a long time ago. Gary Bettman was talking about the same sort of ideas two years ago, and if they resulted in any tangible impact on how the games were run then fans didn't see them. Better late than never, sure, but it's hard not to look at these changes and wonder what took so long.

More importantly, none of this will matter if the league doesn't actually enforce its own rules. And it has to do it publicly—fines and other penalties can't be kept behind the scenes. If teams are violating the rules, the league needs to name and shame. Did anything ever come out of the whole Dennis Wideman mess, in which the Flames allowed the defenseman to return to the ice after a hit he later said had concussed him so badly that he couldn't tell a linesman from an opponent? If so, we never heard about it. Keeping everything under the table sends a message that this stuff isn't important enough to risk embarrassing anyone. But it is, and the league needs to be willing to do so when needed.

But all of that said, progress is still progress, however slowly it comes. Putting these changes in place now is better than holding off even longer, and we're willing to give the league at least some benefit of the doubt that it meant what it said. The league has taken a positive step here. Now let's see it build on that, instead of hanging a "mission accomplished" banner.

With the NHL season underway, teams around the league are hosting their home openers. One of those takes place in Toronto on Saturday. That game will feature the Bruins, the Maple Leafs, and something that's rarely seen in Toronto at this or any other time of year: Hope.

Yes, for the first time in many years, Maple Leafs fans actually have something to be excited about. Oh, the team isn't good—let's not get crazy here. But they might be some day, and that counts as progress in Toronto. They have Matthews and a handful of other elite prospects. And they have an actual plan in place, one that's left Leaf fans with a confusing void where the omnipresent feeling of existential dread should be.

So for today's clip, let's look back at one of the last times that Toronto fans were this excited for a season to get started. This being the Maple Leafs, we have to go back nearly a quarter-century to find it.

• It's Oct. 6, 1992, and the Leafs are hosting the Capitals. They have a new coach and a new-ish franchise player, and there's a palpable buzz in the building, which our TV broadcast is going to attempt to capture in the most awkward way possible.

• We start with a nice shot of Maple Leaf Gardens, which was pretty much the greatest arena ever. If you're too young to remember it, you may get disoriented by old Leafs clips, because the Gardens had this weird thing where the fans sometimes made noise.

• We move on to shots of various Leafs entering the building, including GM Cliff Fletcher, captain Wendel Clark, and soon-to-be-draft-bust Drake Berehowsky. We're also told we're seeing Dmitri Mironov and Nikolai Borschevsky, but the camera is pointing four feet off the ground so only Mironov is visible.

• Wait, why is everyone else entering the building from outside, but Doug Gilmour is walking in from the rink? Did… did Doug Gilmour live in the Maple Leaf Gardens stands? Did he get confused after hearing somebody refer to the area behind the net as Wayne Gretzky's office and think he could set up a home-based business there? Does any of this explain what happened to his legs? I'm kind of concerned right now.

• Next up is the main reason for the optimism: new coach Pat Burns, here to save the Maple Leafs after a stunning defection from Montreal. He parks his car, closes the door, steps over the carcass of Bill Berg, and makes his way inside.

• Now we get to the highlight of the video: Someone has apparently decided it would be a good idea to have our host, Jim "Yes Guy" Tatti, make the walk from the sidewalk into the building on live TV. Tatti is wearing a tuxedo for some reason, and he makes it roughly ten words into his intro before fans start drowning him out by yelling like idiots.

• That guy behind Tatti keeps holding up a Dolphins jacket because he wants to remind long-suffering Maple Leafs fans that things could always be worse.

• Tatti gives us a bit of Leafs history, then wanders past several fans and also Roch Voisine to get to the ticket taker. The camera switches over just in time for this guy to realize he's on live television and execute an exaggerated Vince McMahon gulp. What do you think he was so worried about? I'm leaning toward "told his wife he was working late," but I'll also accept "has been running from the law for the last decade."

• "As you can see, there's a bit of a crowd down here in the lobby." Yeah, who would have thought that would be the case ten minutes before a game that 16,000 people are attending.
• It's around this time that Tatti realizes this whole thing is a terrible idea and just starts shoving his way past the throng of mouth-breathing fans who can't stop waving at the camera. He skips right by the turnstile and starts into a segue about how much optimism is in the air. For example, Jim Tatti is optimistic that his producer is going to fired tonight.

• Honestly, this guy right here is the face that every Maple Leafs fan has been making on the inside at pretty much every moment for the last 50 years. That dude is my spirit animal.

• Tatti grabs a program, and just barely resists the urge to roll it up and use it to start beating everyone within a ten-foot radius. He mentions all the turnover on the Leafs' roster, which was true—Fletcher had basically dumped everyone that he could, remaking a terrible team into something slightly less so and then wondering why local time travelers kept referring to something called a Shanaplan.

• At this point our clip mysteriously skips over a few seconds of footage, which you can catch up on by googling "Jim Tatti Maple Leaf Gardens Live Broadcast Murder Spree," and we find ourselves meeting up with Joe Bowen and Harry Neale. They take over, and Bowen keeps awkwardly looking over to where Tatti was standing even though he's already three orders in at the bar by this point.

• Bowen and Neale were the absolute best, by the way. Neale would pepper his color commentary with all sorts of obscure references about Edgar Allen Poe or children getting beaten at a petting zoo, and Bowen had a knack for coming up with calls that had a way of resonating even years later.

• Neale does a quick recap of the Burns hiring, and we're done. The Leafs lost this game, but amazingly, all that optimism eventually paid off for the Maple Leafs. They put together a franchise record 99-point season, and they came within one win of going to the Stanley Cup Final. Along the way, Gilmour emerged as a Hart candidate, Burns won coach of the year, and Clark punched a crater into Marty McSorley's face. It was good times.

• So could this year's Leaf recreate that magic? It's unlikely. After all, they'd need a new franchise center, a veteran GM plucked from another team, a crusty but well-respected coach and a bunch of new faces. Oh, and it would also help if the Blue Jays could win a World Series or two to keep some of the pressure off. But if all of that somehow did happen, you can bet on two things: The media coverage will be enormous, and it will all take place from safely within a studio where it belongs.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.