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The Toronto Maple Leafs will have to wait a little longer before welcoming back Auston Matthews to a team that has Stanley Cup aspirations.

The New York Islanders can’t afford to wait much longer to begin winning and stave off a potential breakup of the core that reached consecutive NHL semifinals in 2020-21.

The Maple Leafs and Islanders will open the new year by completing a home-and-home set Thursday night, when Toronto visits New York in Elmont, N.Y.

Both teams were off Wednesday after David Kampf, Steven Lorentz and John Tavares scored for the Maple Leafs in a 3-1 win on Tuesday afternoon.

The Maple Leafs moved into a tie for first place with the Florida Panthers in the Atlantic Division, while improving to 2-3-0 during their latest stretch without Matthews, who aggravated an upper-body injury in a 6-3 win over the Buffalo Sabres on Dec. 20. Matthews has missed 14 of Toronto’s 38 games this season with the ailment.

While Matthews won’t play Thursday, the captain practiced with the team Wednesday and said afterward he hoped to see more improvement later in the week. But Matthews acknowledged he wasn’t sure he’d fully heal, even with extended rest.

“It’s tricky with these things sometimes,” Matthews said. “It’s a physical sport. It’s a contact sport. Things happen out there sometimes that are out of your control. Just try to manage it as best as I can, and that we can, and you just go from there.”

The Maple Leafs have struggled to replace the star’s elite production. His 69 goals last season were the most by an NHL player since Mario Lemieux scored 69 goals during the 1995-96 campaign.

Toronto entered Wednesday with 118 goals, the 13th most in the NHL, after leading the Eastern Conference with 298 goals last season. The Maple Leafs have scored three goals or fewer without Matthews in the lineup nine times, including four times in the last five games.

Offense remains a problem for the Islanders even after the December returns of first-liners Mathew Barzal and Anthony Duclair, who have missed a combined 49 games due to injuries.

But Barzal and Duclair have one goal apiece in the five games they’ve played together since Dec. 21, a span in which the Islanders are 2-3-0.

New York scored six goals in beating the Maple Leafs on Dec. 21 and six more to knock off the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday, but has just four goals in the three losses.

The Islanders, whose 102 goals entering Wednesday were tied for the seventh fewest in the NHL, have won consecutive games just twice this season and ended the calendar year five points out of a playoff spot.

If New York’s struggles linger into 2025, impending free agents Brock Nelson and Kyle Palmieri — as well as Anders Lee and Jean-Gabriel Pageau, each of whom have one year left on their deals after this season — could be targets for contenders at the trade deadline.

“We’re worried about just winning games and clawing ourselves back into it and not thinking about the opposite,” Nelson said. “We want to get off to a good start in the new year. We’ve been talking about getting on a roll and just playing good, solid hockey and getting a good stretch of wins to get ourselves back more in the mix, so that’s the main focus.”

–Field Level Media