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But given the perennial punchline status of the franchise, which lost in the first round of the playoffs for the seventh time in Matthews’s eight seasons, this goes beyond giving him a simple pat on the back. In a lot of ways, giving Matthews the captaincy amounts to delivering him a stern kick in the rear.

It’s an apparently necessary reminder that being the alpha dog on hockey’s most talked-about team comes with an obligation — one that Matthews, in the games that matter, hasn’t come close to living up to.

This is the position in which Leafs management has put itself with team president Brendan Shanahan heading into the 11th year of a disappointing tenure. The  Leafs can’t change their failing core, what with the players flexing the power of their no-trade contracts. So they’re changing the pecking order.

Never mind wishing for more from Tavares, who’ll turn 34 next month and whose Leafs story arc likely peaked when he scored the goal that clinched the franchise’s first playoff series win in 19 years in 2023. It’s time to start expecting more of Matthews.

More, after all, is what the money is for. Tavares is entering the merciful final season of his seven-year, $77-million (U.S.) contract. And if Tavares wants to remain a Leaf beyond this season, let’s just say he’ll be giving up more than a piece of C-shaped fabric on a sweater. He’ll be taking a considerable pay cut.

Matthews, meanwhile, is entering his first season of a four-year deal that makes him the highest-paid player in the sport with an annual average value of $13.25 million.

When Matthews signed that deal last summer, he tweeted a valiant intention.

“I will do everything I can to help get us to the top of the mountain,” went his post.

What the Leafs are saying, in bestowing him the captaincy, is simple. To date Matthews’s version of “everything” hasn’t been nearly enough. A winning team needs more from its best player. Matthews has yet to provide it.

Maybe score a goal in a winner-take-all playoff game, which Matthews has yet to do. Maybe score a goal beyond the first round of the playoffs, another thing Matthews has yet to add to his long list of career accomplishments. Remember Matthews’s masterful one-goal, two-assist, team-on-his-back performance in a Game 2 win over Boston in the spring? No one doubts that he’s capable. Now it’s time to prove such performances are repeatable.

In a lot of ways, this is a coronation delayed by half a decade and a full measure of youthful stupidity. Matthews was in line to be named captain back in the off-season of 2019. At the time, the position had been left vacant since Dion Phaneuf was traded in 2016. Matthews had just finished his third year in the league. And though the Leafs had lost in the first round of the playoffs for the third year in a row, Matthews had put forth an impressive effort in that year’s first-round defeat to the Bruins, scoring five goals in seven games.

But in the lead-up to training camp, news emerged that Matthews had spent a night of his off-season finding trouble — enough to find himself charged with disorderly conduct in hometown Scottsdale, Ariz.  for being among a group that attempted to enter the car of a female security guard. That Matthews was alleged to have dropped his pants, but not his underwear, in the security guard’s direction didn’t help matters. Neither did the fact that Matthews didn’t bother to mention his May misstep to  Leafs management, who only found out about it by scrolling Twitter months later.

If there was any debate about who’d get the C that season, Matthews’s escapade sealed the argument. Tavares’s five seasons as captain of a New York Islanders team that won precisely one playoff series during his tenure made him the obvious candidate to lead a   Leafs team that’s won precisely one playoff series in the six seasons since Tavares’s much-ballyhooed arrival.

Changing the captaincy is, to be clear, often the stuff of desperate teams. And the Leafs are precisely that. When the San Jose Sharks couldn’t match their regular-season excellence with playoff transcendence, they stripped Patrick Marleau of the C to give it to Joe Thornton. Thornton would later be stripped of the letter, too. But the Sharks — who made far more playoff hay than the Shanaplan Leafs — never found the success that eluded them. Maybe it says something that years back when  the Leafs were looking for mentors for Matthews and teammate Mitch Marner, they acquired Marleau and, later, Thornton.

The Leafs can only hope Matthews has learned something useful from the tales of those San Jose playoff disappointments, and hopefully from the hurt of his own, about how to lead a team to a place it’s never been. When you’re running a franchise that’s been precisely nowhere in what seems like forever, it’s worth reminding your best player that he should have more to  say than anyone about every season’s final destination.