C-worthy Rielly finding strength in some numbers
DENVER— The subject is analytics, a guaranteed conversation stopper except among the geek set.
Morgan Rielly — not a fan and not a geek — rolls his eyes.
“No. No. No. I don’t even know what they mean. You can give me a sheet of paper with all that data and I wouldn’t know what either the numbers or the letters stand for.”
Were it not for the trending #MeToo babble and a cautionary attitude towards any gesture or comment that might be interpreted as sexually invasive, we would have planted a big wet one on Rielly’s rosy cheek, just for that forthright admission. Most athletes, at least the sane ones, pay scant attention to the statistical deep dive. It’s arcana, the stuff of anally-retentive wonks, although just about every professional sports team has a specialty analytics department now.
Aversion to subtext numbers notwithstanding, we’ll dip a toe in, if only to address some of the peculiarities surrounding Rielly’s deployment as ostensibly the No. 1 back-end Maple Leaf, a distinction he’s come to inhabit incrementally over the past four-plus seasons, from teenager to 23-year-old.
Rielly is averaging 21:33 minutes of ice time per game, which puts him behind Nikita Zaitsev, Jake Gardiner and Dpartner Ron Hainsey among the team’s blue-line crew, and even that figure has been plumped out a smidge in the five games (and counting) that Zaitsev has missed with a lower-body injury believed to be a broken foot off a shot block.
The rest of the defenders — but particularly Connor Carrick, reeled back in from press box purgatory, and coach Mike Babcock’s go-to fave Roman Polak — have filled the Zaitsev gap. (Babcock mused last week, about Polak: “How can I say this right? He’s not fun for some people to watch, but he’s great for the coach to watch.”)
No. 44 has been averaging 17:57 TOI, 2:12 on the power play — which he typically anchors with Gardiner — and merely 1:25 in short-handed situations.
His other half — that’s five-on-five half — Hainsey leads the league, averaging 4:23 short-handed ice duty per game. In Phoenix on Thursday, he ate up the entirety of a two-man disadvantage for a minute and 44 seconds in the second period, with forward jobber Dominic Moore one of the Leafs in the box.
It’s getting a tad ridiculous, how many miles Hainsey is logging on the short-handed pedometer and perhaps not sustainable over the course of an 82-game season. But Babcock is disinclined to mess with what’s working by perhaps spooning out a bit more of that load to, say, Rielly. While Rielly and the veteran Hainsey are a solid twosome at even strength, they infrequently see the ice together on the penalty kill — a task allotment shouldered heavily by Hainsey and Zaitsev, prior to the latter’s injury, even though it could be argued that putting so much of the responsibility on Zaitsev was actually harming his five-on-five acquittal with regular D-mate Gardiner. That duo had more than its share of defensive struggles through the first few months of the campaign.
Some observers suspected Babcock was trying to save some juice with Rielly for later on in the season. Even later on in a game, Rielly’s shifts — he’s averaging 29 per night, more than his back-end colleagues but tending towards shorter duration — will typically increase if the Leafs are chasing a tying goal, because of his offensive value.
In any event, Babcock slapped back the theory he’d be ratcheting up Rielly’s ice time, beyond the set-instone, five-on-five formula. “No, I never said that, ever. We’re just going to play him when we need him. When he plays in the one pair and he’s matched against the other team’s top line, sometimes you play less, if you can imagine that, than if you were playing against two lines in that second group. That’s just the way it goes.
“We need him to do what he’s doing. They (Hainsey and Rielly) don’t normally play together on the penalty kill because that’s Zaitsev’s job and Rielly plays on the power play. Without Z, Rielly gets a little more time on the PK.”
Hainsey may be masterful on that PK but the fact remains: Toronto is middle-of-the-pack proficient avoiding power-play goals, at 82.5 per cent (12th in the league) even with rather spectacular Freddie Andersen between the pipes .( Toronto’s Rielly-quarterbacked PP is a more impressive fifth-best at 22.9 percent ,25 for 109, although, facing the Avalanche here on Friday night, they were up against the best home penalty kill in the league, Colorado not allowing a PPG in its previous nine games.)
The point Babcock stresses is that Rielly’s crucial value is playing against the opposition’s top-line threat: nine minutes against Connor McDavid a couple of weeks ago, 10:33 five-on-five against Alex Ovechkin, 10:13 against Claude Giroux when the Leafs lost 4-2 in Philadelphia on Dec. 12. All those duels cost Rielly offensive-zonestart percentage, which is about where we withdraw from the analytics fray.
“It’s normally outlined pretty well what our task is,” says Rielly, who isn’t about to quibble with his coach’s D-squad strategy and structure. “I mean, our coach knows what he’s doing with the combination of the D and the lines. Each choice that he makes has a purpose. As players, you just accept your role, go out and do it.”
Rielly is far more enthusiastic discussing the sweet spot of simpatico he’s found with 36-year-old Hainsey, the tall cool glass of free-agent water from Connecticut.
“At training camp this year, I sort of knew what kind of player he was. And I knew what to expect out of him. That said, it’s been better than I expected. Our style has been close to what I imagined it would be. But I underestimated his knowledge of the game and his experience. That’s been a huge aspect of what has made this team successful and him extremely successful as well.”
And Rielly extremely successful, as a co-bulldog on defence who infrequently suffers coverage and positioning brain cramps anymore, and for his offensive thrust — at 26 points (four goals, 22 assists) the top producer from the back end, top 20 among defencemen across the league, and well beyond his points pace from a year ago, when he finished with six goals and 21 assists, a season that didn’t always unfold smoothly with Rielly dropped from first-pair designation at one point.
We’ll say it again: Rielly should be this team’s captain. He’s earned it. He hasn’t been here just a minute and a half. And he’s the Leaf reporters seek out first for comment in the dressing room.
“I have a long way to go still,” Rielly reflects, and he’s not talking about the C, just to be clear. “There’s been nights where I feel like we’ve played well and I’ve moved the puck well, and nights where I haven’t.
“I want to do it more consistently and do it better. Long way to go before I’m satisfied.”