When it comes to deciding where to rank everyone, I first have to decide what matters most. Obviously, championships are what we all chase, but I’m not going to rank teams solely by how many mugs they have.
For me, it’s a combination of regular-season success and postseason success. Just compare Matt to Eric. Overall, Vozzola has had the better regular-season résumé. It’s not a massive gap, but more playoff appearances are more impressive than fewer. That said, I’m always going to give a slight bump to teams that consistently perform when the stakes are highest.
That’s where we come back to Matt, seen above telling a small child to “man up and enjoy the ride to daddy’s favorite movie, Frozen, or else he’s going back into the room in the basement we don’t talk about.”
For his entire career, no team in this league has experienced higher highs and lower lows from one season to the next than Neatock, and that’s exactly how this decade began.
In 2016, Matt turned in one of the worst seasons of the modern era. He won just two games, averaged only 1,260 points per contest, and finished dead last in both the standings and total points.
One year later, he completely flipped the script.
In 2017, he won nine games, finished second in the regular season, captured the scoring title, and then put together the greatest postseason run in league history. He opened with 2,128 points in a quarterfinal win over 7-seed Griff, then followed it with 2,019 points in a semifinal victory over Jeff, becoming the first—and still only—manager to top 2,000 points in two playoff games in the same postseason. He capped it all off by winning his third championship, handing Bob his first-ever loss in a title game with a 1,537-1,119 victory. His 5,684 postseason points remain the league record.
The following season, the inconsistency returned. After a 2-5 start, Matt looked dead in the water. But he rallied, and thanks in part to a massive 11-player trade with me, he snuck into the playoffs as the 7-seed. Despite failing to crack 1,500 points in either the quarterfinals or semifinals, he upset 2-seed Bob and 1-seed Marc before edging Calderon in the championship, 1,631-1,578, to capture back-to-back titles.
Since then, however, the results have been far more ordinary. Over the last seven seasons, Matt is just 43-53 in the regular season. He has still reached the playoffs five times, but never as anything higher than a 4-seed.
What keeps this stretch from being viewed as a complete disappointment is his ability to elevate his game in the postseason. He’s the polar opposite of whatever Rob Masterson is. Over the past decade, Matt is 6-1 in the quarterfinals, 3-3 in the semifinals, and 2-1 in championship games, highlighted by back-to-back titles in 2017 and 2018 before falling to Colby in the 2022 finals.
The decade-long numbers paint the same picture.
Matt is just 60-75 in the regular season, a .444 winning percentage that ranks ahead of only Don and Griff. But once the playoffs begin, he’s a different manager. His 11-5 postseason record (.688) is the best winning percentage in the league. Combined, he’s 71-80 overall, good for the eighth-best record of the decade.
He has averaged 1,372 points per game, seventh best overall. That number gets a significant boost from his playoff production, where he averages 1,555 points per game; the second best in league history. His regular-season average of 1,350 points ranks seventh.
His average finish in the standings is 7.30 (ninth), while his average finish in points is 6.70 (eighth). He has scored at least 1,500 points in 47 games, representing 31.1% of his contests, the fifth-highest rate in the league. He has also recorded 10 weekly high scores, tied for seventh most. On the other hand, no one has bottomed out more often. Matt’s 17 weekly low scores are the most in the league.
And that’s really the story of Matt’s last 10 years. Nobody has been harder to define. His regular-season résumé is mediocre, his week-to-week consistency is nearly nonexistent, and his teams have been capable of looking like both championship contenders and cellar dwellers from one year to the next. But when the playoffs arrive, few folks have been more dangerous. Two championships, three Finals appearances, the greatest postseason run the league has ever seen, and the best playoff winning percentage of the decade ensure that, despite all the inconsistency, Matt’s legacy will always be that of a team no one wants to face when it mattered most.