I do though. I regularly label Matthews a franchise talent and one of the great young Centers in this game. Moving forward, I group him with MacKinnon, Barkov & Eichel; in the tier of kids behind McJesus that I think all have the talent to pose the biggest challenge to Connor's crown in any given season throughout the next decade...but I'm not convinced that any of them will ever put up another season quite as ridiculous as the one Nate just had...and I include Nate in that.
Though I think MacK can & will get even better (as will the others); if Nate's never quite as dominant as he was from game 10 of this season until that last game against Nashville, I won't be completely shocked. The kid went off on a 1.4 pt per game tear over the remaining 70 regular season & playoff games of his year...a ridiculous # of them being primary pts, as his 77 primary pts were bested only by McDavid's 79, in 8 more games, and he was the only NHLer to top 3.00 primary pts/60 with his 3.14...and that with no support from our other lines at all to take any attention off of MacK's line; as evidenced by how our PP dropped from 22% on the season to ~7% when he was out & the dismal secondary scoring #s for the 2017-2018 Avs.
The only other Avs who have ever had seasons like that were Sakic & Forsberg, and it's not like either of those two legendary HOFers had all that many of them. So my comments reflect more just the incredible level that MacK hit after everything clicked at that 10 game mark. As, even though I rate all 4 of those young franchise centers' talent similarly, I can't pick Matthews or Eichel ahead of MacK until they have a season where they're arguably the best in the league, cause development isn't linear or guaranteed to continue ad infinitum. To though they're all amazing talents, they may well never be this great. i.e. Matthews could make a lot of progress over the next 3 years and still max out below MacKinnon 2017-2018, ya know?
Which doesn't mean that things won't change in the future (probably on an annual basis) when the others show that they are going to be elite NHLers & not just elite rookies/sophomores; or that MacK doesn't need to show that he wasn't just historically hot and have another season where he dominates up to his ability. But at this point? You'd have to think the difference in their raw ability was a lot bigger than I do to think that Matthews' ceiling is higher than what we've already seen from MacK by enough to justify picking him