One-on-one with Morgan Rielly: On his ‘up and down’ year for the Maple Leafs

Morgan Rielly is in good spirits.

It’s the day after he made a meaningful Rielly-like impact on a game, punching in a goal against the Avalanche. He hasn’t had as many of those nights as he would like this season, and so, a day after this one, he is feeling good, noticeably so – feeling confident, crucially.

“It’s been interesting – it’s been a chance to learn,” Rielly says of his 10th NHL season during an interview with The Athletic. “I feel like prior to my injury I was really happy with how things were going. And then I came back and I didn’t get going as quickly as I wanted to. I felt like I was doing OK, but I didn’t really have the impact I wanted to have.”

That would be the left knee injury that sidelined Rielly for 15 games, beginning in late November. It’s only the second time in his long Leafs career – the longest of any current player – that Rielly has missed substantial time with an injury. (He missed 23 games with a broken left foot during the 2019-20 season.)

It’s a mostly overlooked, probably underrated quality: Rielly doesn’t miss many games. He played 82 last year, 55 of 56 the year before that, and 76 or more in the five seasons before that 19-20 season.

The injury just happened to come in the first year of a new eight-year contract ($7.5 million cap hit) that places him just outside the league’s 20 highest-paid defencemen.

“I remember the game against Florida at home,” Rielly says of a near-25 minute night against the Panthers on Jan. 17, “I was able to mentally turn a corner, and I felt like I started playing some pretty good hockey there for a stretch.”

Then came a 10-game stretch when any time Rielly was on the ice the puck seemed to find its way into his net – 10 times in all at 5-on-5. Too many.

“It’s been up and down,” he conceded of his season to this point. “I feel really good right now.”

Last year it all seemed to go right for Rielly.

He averaged almost 24 minutes. He scored 10 times. He tied for sixth among all NHL defencemen with 68 points. He finished 11th in Norris Trophy voting. And while his team lost in the first round of the playoffs, Rielly performed well – three goals, including the only Leaf marker in Game 7, to go along with three assists in 22.5 minutes a night.

This year, so far anyway, it’s been the opposite, a season-long hustle for the most part.

After a bumpy October for him and everyone else with the Leafs, Rielly was starting to emerge on both sides of the puck in November when he collided inadvertently with Kyle Palmieri on Nov. 21, injuring his knee.

He returned five and a half weeks later on Dec. 29.

“It was a tough thing because when you try to come back in a certain time frame your instincts or brain almost tell you to not overdo it, don’t over-complicate anything, just play simple,” Rielly recalled of the initial comeback from the MCL injury. “And then a week or 10 days go by where you’re just trying to play simple and you’re like, ‘Well, I’m OK now, but I’m not impacting the game at the rate I want to. Am I OK here?’ Yes. But that’s not what we’re going for.”

The guy who once potted 20 goals in a season failed to find the back of the for the first 35 games. It wasn’t until Jan. 29 that Rielly finally scored his first goal of the season. (He’s added three more since.)

Offensively. Defensively. It’s all just been up and down.

Rielly returns home after games these days (or to the team hotel when the Leafs are on the road) and reviews all of his shifts on an iPad. It’s not the kind of thing he or most guys did when his Leafs career first started way back in 2013, when Randy Carlyle was still the team’s head coach, but it’s become part of the routine now for the guy who turned 29 this month.

It’s a way for him to process what exactly happened. In those early days, it was “flush it” and move on.

“I use it for not mental health, I’m not saying that, but like, almost clarity,” Rielly explained. “Like you leave (the rink) and you wonder, ‘Was I good? Is that the right play? I felt slow – I wonder how it looked.’ And then you go back and you watch and you’re like, ‘All right, my instincts were right here and that was the right read.’ It helps you feel good about what you did. And then obviously if you didn’t play well it’s a different feeling. But I do find a lot of it is just like it helps your perspective on your game when you reflect on it.”

Rielly will typically go over his performance the next day with Dean Chynoweth, the assistant coach who has run the Leafs D for the last two seasons.

“I think the great quality that he has is that he’s able to read and able to communicate with you without being overbearing,” Rielly of Chynoweth, who played nearly 250 games in the NHL. “If you have questions for him, he’s extremely knowledgeable. But he also believes in instincts and just learning on the fly – if you make a mistake, you address it, and you move on type thing.”

Rielly and Chynoweth have developed a good rapport.

Last season, Rielly had plans to attend a Raptors game with Auston Matthews. Chynoweth told them he was thinking about going himself. Rielly and Matthews sent him a group text, inviting him to join them for dinner.

He showed up and hung out with the two Leaf stars before the game.

Not unlike Matthews, the numbers – below the hood and on the surface, offensively and defensively – are all just a little bit worse for Rielly this season.

Rielly, for instance, generated 1.5 points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 last year. So far this season: 1.1

Some of that looks to be a product of luck: Rielly has an on-ice shooting percentage in those spots of 8.1 percent, down from 10.5 last year and 10 the year before that.

The Leafs are generating expected goals at about the same clip – 2.9 per 60.

Rielly hasn’t made teams feel his presence that way quite as much though. He’s not been as daring or involved, which probably ties back to the inclination to keep things simple after the injury.

He’s shooting the puck less and seeing it fall less, too. He shot 9 percent when he popped 20 during the 2018-19 season. This year: 3.7 percent.

“Obviously the biggest thing that would probably weigh on him is not scoring,” Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said recently. “You’re a guy that has that ability, has produced in the past, and that the team relies on him for those types of things – power play, 5-on-5, whatever it might be.”

One number that really sticks out on the other side of things and matches the eye test: The number of high-danger attempts the Leafs are giving up with Rielly on the ice. It’s up over 13 per 60 at 5-on-5, the highest rate of Rielly’s career and most among Leaf defencemen this season.

Sometimes, Rielly just isn’t stiff or sturdy enough around his own net.

Sometimes, he makes bad or awkward or late decisions defending in space.

His errors (including a missed connection with Mitch Marner against the Islanders on Tuesday night) have been occasionally glaring, casting a shadow on all the good and often subtle things he’ll do some nights.

“When things are going bad you start to chase it a little bit,” Rielly says. “You start to overcompensate and try to make up for mistakes and almost try to do too much.”

Rielly is at his best defensively when he puts his powerful skating to good use.

Those legs, coupled with ace QB-like vision, help make him something of a one-man breakout. He continues to make plays with the puck that no other defender on the Leafs can make, the kind that feel almost taken for granted now after he’s been around for so long.

Like firing a down-ice dart for Marner fetch:

Or creating something out of nothing for now-former Leaf Dryden Hunt.

Rielly has to take some chances to make a difference, but not too many. He has to be choosy – and maybe he’s been too choosy at times this season. Or not choosy enough in certain spots either.

“A big part of it is confidence. Just a mentality almost,” Rielly says. “And I think when I watch my games and then I watch other players play, I don’t think that my game is overly high risk or overly aggressive. Like, there’s guys that take people on 1-on-1 a lot more than I do. And I think that I almost lean more to the conservative side, where you move it and jump into holes as opposed to trying to beat guys.

“It’s a balance. And I think for me it really comes down to a mindset, having the confidence to go out there and try to control games. It’s not the easiest thing. It’s an ongoing process and work in progress. I feel like when I’m playing well and confident, I can play with anybody. Trying to achieve that every night over a long period of time is difficult.”

Six more points and Rielly will pass Ian Turnbull for fourth all-time among Leafs defencemen. If he plays long enough, he’s got a shot of catching the late Börje Salming for top spot.

Rielly has probably been more affected than anyone else by Keefe’s decision to roll out seven defencemen lately. To go from playing 28 minutes, as Rielly did on Jan. 25, to playing just over 17, as he did against Carolina on March 17, has to be an adjustment.

Those were the fewest minutes Rielly had seen on a night that didn’t include injury since 2014 when he was just a kid in the league.

Rielly is averaging just under 17 minutes per game at 5-on-5 this season, down from 19 two seasons ago.

His rhythm is bound to be affected by the recent drop-off.

“It’s different for sure,” Rielly said tersely after a game recently.

The more time he can spend on the ice with Matthews in particular, the better. The Leafs are winning almost 60 percent of the expected goals when those two share the ice. (Fewer minutes with David Kämpf, on the other hand, would probably be a good thing. Expected goals for the Leafs when those two are out there: 41 percent. Kämpf botched a handoff from Rielly in the most recent loss to the Islanders.)

A related point of instability for Rielly is the rotating cast of partners he’s had this season, few lasting more than a couple weeks at a time. Rielly played with TJ Brodie last week against the Hurricanes, Luke Schenn against the Senators a night later, and Erik Gustafsson against the Islanders on Tuesday night. He’s played at least 160 minutes with three guys – Brodie, Timothy Liljegren, and Justin Holl.

He seems to work best – by a lot – with Brodie (as does everyone who plays with Brodie).

“I know I feel comfortable out there with (Brodie),” Rielly said. “Maybe that is what it is – just kind of a comfort level thing. If you’re changing all the time or if you’re out there playing left sometimes, right sometimes, it can be hard to get comfortable, get your bearings.”

Keeping Brodie with Rielly creates complications for the rest of the pairs. Can Rielly dial in enough defensively to square off against Tampa’s top line in a playoff series? Will the other pairings be good enough? It’s something the Leafs coaching staff still has to figure out before the playoffs.

Regardless, the Leafs need a better, more consistent version of Rielly than they’ve gotten for most of the season. He knows that, especially with the playoffs, where he’s often played his best, coming up.

“With this much time left in the season,” he said, “I think it’s a great opportunity for me to take my game to my next level and start playing really well, and I have all the confidence in the world that I can do that.

“I always want to be more consistent.”

(Top photo: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)

Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference, and Stat Head