Always room to grow
Defenceman Rielly knows being better doesn’t mean being perfect
VANCOUVER— Ask Morgan Rielly his worst moment this season and he grimaces. He doesn’t write them down, so much as they stick in his brain the way you remember your screw-ups — the time you called somebody by the wrong name, the time you lost a wallet, the time you dinged another car in the parking lot. Like that.
“I mean, there are plays,” said Rielly, before his annual homecoming game with the Toronto Maple Leafs in Vancouver. “It’s not games necessarily, but plays. New York, in MSG, first shift, I turned it over, they scored. Just s--- like that. That happens from time to time, and you don’t want to do that often, but when you do, it hurts, and you want to … not do that so often.” He laughs.
“I mean, I remember the bad stuff a lot easier than the good stuff. When you’re feeling really confident and you’re feeling really good about yourself it’s good to remember that it’s not always like that, and you can be a
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dummy sometimes too.”
That’s where Rielly finds himself as he comes home, playing top minutes for a team that entered Wednesday night tied for the fourth-best record in the league, second among all defencemen in points with 63, first among defencemen in goals with 16. He used to get nervous when he would play back in Vancouver, in front of family and friends, returning to the town where he grew up. That’s over, now. At 25, Rielly is having the year he has always wanted. Or one of them, anyway.
“I love the way he plays,” said Calgary’s Mark Giordano, who entered the night one point behind Rielly among defencemen. “I met him a few times and he’s a great guy and a great person, but I love the way he plays … The hardest thing to do as a young guy is defend. It takes a few hundred games to really get that understanding of not running around and being positionally sound. And like everything else, when you get that confidence in your own end it translates all over the ice.”
“I’ve known him for a long time, a real long time,” said Calgary coach Bill Peters, earlier in the trip. “He’s got way more offence than people think, you’re starting to see that here this year … I think as he gets more comfortable in the league, as (players) get more and more comfortable, they revert back to what they were as a junior and as a youth hockey player, and that’s what he’s done. And as he’s gotten better, the team around him has gotten better, and it’s easier.”
Easier doesn’t mean easy, though. Rielly is trying to live up to his own expectations in every game now. He wants to eliminate mistakes entirely, whether that’s possible or not. He is comfortable, but not satisfied.
“I mean, it might just be a shift or a period in a game, but when you are at the point where you want to be really good every night, you know, those bother you more than they used to,” Rielly says. “But at the same time, you have to be mature enough to move on from them.”
“I mean, you can watch the best D-men in the league, like (Victor) Hedman, like (Drew) Doughty, (Erik) Karlsson, (Brent) Burns and those guys, and they make mistakes all the time. So I think you realize that no one’s perfect. I mean, you want to be as close to perfect as you can be, and when you’re not, it annoys you.
“And you want to get better and you don’t want to have that happen all the time. But you do realize when you watch those games late at night, when you watch those guys go head to head, they make mistakes too. So that helps you deal with it. But you want to be really good all the time, on and off the ice.”
In the most basic analysis, Rielly was a minus-70 for his career before this season, and this year he is a plus-31 while playing heavy minutes with the declining Ron Hainsey. The Leafs score 61 per cent of the 5-on-5 goals with those two on the ice: when Rielly shares the ice with Mitch Marner and John Tavares, often against top competition, the number is 67 per cent. Those two drop to 52 per cent without Rielly, while he goes down to 56 and 59 per cent, respectively. They all make one another better.
So it’s not that Rielly broods over the mistakes, or obsesses; it’s that they stand out more, with the fewer he makes. And he is enjoying figuring out how to deal with that.
“The good players are able to move on from it faster,” he says. “So I like it. That’s part of the mental growth I want to go through. That’s part of the battle, that’s why you want to do it, that’s why you enjoy it: because you learn new things about yourself, and new things about the game that you have to get better at.”
He is told he could be in the Norris Trophy conversation, and that self-assurance and comfort gives way to butterflies in the stomach. “Well, easy now,” Rielly says. “We’ll see. I don’t want to talk about it.” It used to be coming back to Vancouver would give him the jitters. But now, Morgan Rielly is learning to feel at home almost anywhere he lands.