Has market priced Rielly out of town?

As the summer sped by without meaningful negotiations on a Morgan Rielly contract extension, his case for a major payday only grew stronger.

These last few weeks saw an undeniable shift upwards in the market for defencemen who eat big minutes and drive offence. And the shift may have created a divide between the Maple Leafs and their longest-tenured player that will ultimately prove too wide to bridge.

Shared history and sentiment aside, where exactly is the wiggle room here?

This is the most important contract of Rielly’s career. And in a flat-cap NHL environment general manager Kyle Dubas must weigh the merits of any significant salary commitment against what he’d need to cut away from the organization’s base in order to accommodate it.

That explains in part why there’ve only been a couple of surface-level conversations between Rielly’s camp and Leafs management to this point. The CBA has permitted them to sign a deal that would take effect in July 2022 for more than six weeks now, and during that period the marketplace has evolved.

Seth Jones, Zach Werenski, Cale Makar and Dougie Hamilton all signed long-term contracts carrying an average annual value at $9 million (U.S.) or higher — doubling the number of cap hits at that level for defencemen leaguewide.

Even if those players don’t serve as perfect enough comparables to vault Rielly to that lofty benchmark, it’s difficult to imagine his next contract coming in anywhere below $8 million per year given his productivity and the fact he’s logged more minutes than any other Leaf across the last five seasons.

There’s a limited supply of defencemen who do what he does. And either Rielly or John Klingberg would take billing as the top UFA blueliner next summer if they hit the open market.

Consider the company Rielly is keeping with .53 points per game across 572 career games: That’s a hair below Hamilton (.56 in 607) and John Carlson (.55 in 608) at the time they signed monster deals, but ahead of where Oliver Ekman-Larsson (.50 in 576), Jones (.49 in 580) and Victor Hedman (.49 in 470) were when putting pen to paper on their most recent contracts.