I agree with the underlying numbers argument. People scoff when you throw numbers around but the averages always have a way of correcting themselves and nobody is immune to it. They're based on years, if not decades of statistical evidence. Think of it like the difference between climate vs weather, predicting the weather (short term - game by game basis) is hard because so many variables can change the outcome in a given game. However look at the pattern of weather over the span of many years (akin to a full season or multiple seasons) and you can see the bigger picture trend of what is sustainable and what isn't. Our first 20-25 games were unsustainable for a lot of guys (same exact thing happened last season if anybody remembers, hot start and cooled off around this time) and we're paying for it with slumps now.
Matthews shooting 30% out of the gate for example, nobody, NOBODY sustains anywhere near that rate. He was 100% guaranteed to correct downward until he settled at a more reasonable rate and that is currently occurring. Now, in a perfect world it would be a more gradual correction but in this case he hit a hard slump and its correcting hard all at once. It won't last, he will start getting his goals again and by the end of the year should settle out around the 16% or so shooting percentage hes averaged over his relatively short career to date. Even that is a bit high for many goal scorers, I wouldn't be surprised if he was more of a 14-15% shooter after his career is said and done. He's hovering around 19.5% right now so he should be close to picking it up again.
When Ovechkin came flying out of the gate and hit 30 goals media guys were saying he was going to hit 70 goals. He was also shooting like 25%, and his career average believe it or not is a mere 12.6%. He's also cooled off and is now hovering around 17.7% which is still high for him. In the end he'll get his 50+ goals but anybody who looked at his historical rates would never think he'd actually hit anywhere near 70.
You get an occasional instance where a player holds a ridiculous rate for an entire season but it always results in a crash the next year. William Karlsson anyone? Jonathan Cheechoo?
The hockey gods with their stats and averages are undefeated. This is two years in a row we get off to an unsustainably hot start which only gets peoples hopes up and makes the fanbase think we're a different team than we are, only to have outrage when we inevitably hit a slump that corrects the trend to where it should have been in the first place. I'd much rather start slower and maintain a steady pace all year than go through these wild swings but it is what it is. Maybe next year.
After the ebbs and flows of a full season settle out we should be better than we were last year thanks to the addition of Tavares and breakouts by guys like Marner and Rielly but to think we were going to crush teams all year long like we did the first third or so of the season just isn't reasonable. It's easy to get discouraged by multiple slumps occurring at once but we WILL bounce back, Matthews WILL start scoring again, hell even Nylander's luck will improve and he'll have a stronger stretch run.
TL;DR: Step back from the ledges people, everything will be fine and the team as a whole will bounce back from these temporary slumps.