Disgusting Behavior: Toronto Star attacks Auston Matthews for going to the White House after winning Olympic Gold

This might be the dumbest sports column written in North America this year, and we are only two months in.

The Toronto Star’s Damien Cox published a piece accusing Auston Matthews of putting “the party and the president ahead of the playoffs” because he went to the White House after winning Olympic gold for Team USA.

Read that sentence again.

A man won a gold medal for his country, accepted his President’s invitation to celebrate it, and a Toronto columnist decided that was worth an entire column questioning his priorities.

This is unhinged.

Toronto Star writes absolute garbage about Auston Matthews

Auston Matthews made his choice, seemingly putting the party and the president ahead of the playoffs https://t.co/YbVZkvAcdd

— Toronto Star (@TorontoStar) February 26, 2026

Auston Matthews is American. He was born in Scottsdale, Arizona.

He represented the United States of America at the Olympics and won the first men’s gold medal for this country since 1980.

That is one of the greatest individual accomplishments any hockey player can have and his reward, apparently, is a lecture from the Toronto Star about optics.

Here is what Cox conveniently left out of his piece. The US women’s gold medal team is also going to the White House. Trump announced it during the State of the Union. USA Hockey called the invitation an honor and said the visit would be scheduled after their seasons wrap.

So where is the column about the women putting the president ahead of their professional responsibilities? Where is that piece? It does not exist, because Cox was never actually writing about playoffs or priorities.

He was writing about his feelings about Donald Trump and chose Auston Matthews as the vehicle to express them. That is not sports journalism. That is using an athlete as a prop for a political opinion piece and pretending it is something else.

This is bullshit and the Toronto Star and Damien Cox should be embarrassed:

The hypocrisy would be almost funny if it were not so transparently unfair to Auston Matthews. This is a man who has given Toronto everything. He has shown up every single season, scored goals at an elite rate, won a Selke Trophy, captured a Hart Trophy, and carried a franchise that has not won a Stanley Cup since 1967.

He has done it without complaining, without demanding trades, and without the kind of drama that follows most star players of his caliber.

The “thank you” Auston Matthews gets from the local media is a column suggesting he does not take the playoffs seriously because he shook the hand of the American president after winning a gold medal.

This is also not happening in a vacuum. Toronto has a well-established and well-documented history of running its own players out of town through relentless, bad-faith media coverage.

The pattern is always the same. A star player arrives with enormous expectations. The media builds him up. The moment anything goes sideways, the same outlets that celebrated him start chipping away. Eventually the player gets tired of it and leaves, and then everyone asks why Toronto cannot keep its franchise players.

Auston Matthews has not left yet but columns like this one are a very specific reason why that question always comes up, and the Toronto media never seems willing to look in the mirror long enough to understand their own role in creating that dynamic.

Auston Matthews won a gold medal. He went to the White House. He came back to Toronto to play hockey. The only thing he owes anyone is to keep doing his job, which he has done at an elite level for nearly a decade.

The Toronto Star and Damien Cox owes him an apology.

Join The Chase