Rielly a slam dunk on blue line
In his sixth NHL season, defenceman is getting the jump on the competition
A few years ago, Morgan Rielly visited Joffrey Lupul at Lupul’s Queen Street West loft.
This was before Lupul fell into a salary-cap loophole and disappeared from the NHL. Lupul’s place, at least at the time, was described by one ex-Leaf as a “bachelor’s paradise,” complete with a living area spacious enough to feature a regulation basketball hoop.
Rielly, eyeing the rim, announced to Lupul he could dunk.
“I said, ‘You’re too short,’ ” Lupul said, speaking a while back.
Rielly is listed at six-foot-one, 220 pounds.
“I think he’s only six foot, or maybe a touch under,” Lupul figured.
Perhaps offended by being underestimated, Rielly, six foot or not, promptly grabbed a ball and jammed.
“Obviously there’s some power in those legs,” Lupul said. “It was impressive.”
We bring up the anecdote because the topic du jour in Leafland is Rielly’s impeccable knack for knowing when to jump. Not “jump,” as in achieve hangtime — although Rielly’s gift for vertical elevation speaks to an explosiveness that’s also evident on ice. This is “jump,” as in, into a rush. While Rielly has always displayed admirable judgment when it comes to deciding when to abandon his defensive responsibility for an offensive opportunity, it’s only this year, Rielly’s sixth NHL season, that he’s setting himself apart as one of the league’s elite scoresheet-filling blueliners.
Not only is Rielly, at age 24, the Toronto veteran who appears most ready to be team captain. (Players only a few years younger, like Mitch Marner, see Rielly as both a mentor and a friend. And as head coach Mike Babcock said the other day: “No one likes being a Maple Leaf more than Morgan.”)
Heading into Monday’s slate of games, Rielly was leading all NHL defenceman with six goals and 18 points. The last Toronto defenceman to rack up 18 points through 14 games was Tomas Kaberle, the four-time all-star. The one before that was Borje Salming, the Hall of Famer.
And this is hardly some one-month lucky streak. Since the beginning of last season, when Babcock unlocked the shackles that kept Rielly out of the power-play rotation during the 2016-17 season, Rielly has been one of the league’s top offensive defencemen.
Rielly, over that span, has 70 points. Heading into Monday, that was the same number as Drew Doughty, one more than both P.K. Subban and Erik Karlsson, and three more than Victor Hedman. Doughty, Subban, Karlsson and Hedman have only combined to win five of the past seven Norris Trophies.
Leafs Nation has been pining for a No. 1 defenceman for years now, via trade or freeagent signing. Over the past year or so Rielly has morphed into one via hard-working perseverance and intelligence. In his six seasons he’s played with umpteen different partners, from Matt Hunwick to Dion Phaneuf to current go-to Ron Hainsey. He’s played both the right side and the left. He’s slogged it out on the penalty kill and, more recently, come to quarterback the No. 1 power play.
This season he has 18 points, tied with Marner for the team lead. The other seven Toronto defencemen who’ve seen time in the lineup this season have 17 points combined.
Rielly, mind you, has all but declined to discuss his earlyseason output, deferring all credit to his teammates.
“We’ve played well as a group, and that tends to reflect kindly upon individuals,” he told reporters on Monday. “That’s about it.”
That monotone response goes against his reputation as an on-ice bon vivant.
“He’s got a lot of energy constantly,” Marner, the resident sparkplug, told reporters on Monday. “On the ice, you see it, it’s a lot of fun being out there with him, joking around. On the power play when you score or anything, usually it’s us screaming, getting loud about it.”
If you’re wondering why Rielly avoids substantial comment on what he’s accomplished so far, it’s important to remember who’s running the team.
A few weeks ago, Babcock used the occasion of Rielly usurping a mini-record once held by Bobby Orr by scoring 12 points in his team’s first five games to point out that Rielly still had a ways to travel to become a fully formed, allsituations back-end horse. And Babcock couldn’t resist reminding reporters after Saturday’s 5-0 win in Pittsburgh, wherein Rielly scored twice, that the same weak spots sometimes still linger.
“He’s always good offensively, sometimes not quite as good (defensively),” Babcock said, this while praising Rielly’s defensive work on Saturday.
Fair enough. It’s November. Babcock and Rielly are both clearly interested in succeeding in April, May and June. And as much as Rielly’s early success has been eye-catching, there are levels of achievement still untouched. Some observers have compared Rielly to Duncan Keith, the blue line linchpin of three Stanley Cupwinning teams in Chicago. And certainly the career arcs of the players share some qualities. Through his first 402 games in the league, Rielly has 189 points. Keith, through the same number, had 196.
But from there, they diverge. Keith won his first of two Norris Trophies in his fifth season (when, on account of a twoseason stint in the AHL, he was aged 26). Rielly, who spent all of 14 games in the AHL, doesn’t turn 25 until March. If he can keep up something even close to his current pace, there’s no doubt he’ll find himself in the thick of this season’s Norris conversation.
Keith, of course, took his dominance to another level in the post-season. When the Blackhawks won their most recent Cup, in 2015, Keith averaged an astonishing 31 minutes a game during a 23game post-season run en route to the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. Since the NHL began tracking ice time in 1997-98, Keith has averaged more than 28 minutes a night in the playoffs. The only player who’s carried a bigger portion of his team’s load, minimum 110 playoff games, is Chris Pronger, the Hall of Famer, who averaged more than 29 minutes a game in 154 postseason matches in which his ice time was tracked.
Rielly, who averaged about 21 minutes a game during Toronto’s first-round ouster to the Bruins last spring, has spoken of aspiring to command more ice time when it matters. That’s for another day.
For now, Rielly will take some momentary pleasure in the collective work of the Maple Leafs defensive corps, long identified as a franchise weak spot but slowly earning respect.
“I think we all take it a little bit personally. There’s lots of talk about our D corps needing to improve,” Rielly said. “I think as players we went home and worked hard all summer and we made sure in training camp we were ready to go. We’ve got a long way to go and lots of room to improve, but I think it’s a good start.”
A good start, but it’s not as though defensive dominance is suddenly a slam dunk. Rielly, mind you, an all-round athlete who spent his youth as a dynamite baseball pitcher and a formidable track star, still finds occasion to throw down. Speaking a few weeks back, Rielly said he dunked a basketball this past off-season. (As a point of dressing-room comparison, Frederik Andersen, Toronto’s six-foot-four goaltender, said recently that he can only dunk a tennis ball because he can’t palm a basketball).
A few years ago, Lupul remembered Rielly embellishing his living-room jam with youthful zest.
“He had a big celebration after,” Lupul said.
As Rielly said then: “You can’t dunk and not celebrate.”