Rielly takes place among NHL’S best defencemen
Leafs rearguard firmly established as team leader
Of course, the dunk came up. It was the first thing that came up.
Turns out Morgan Rielly can dunk a basketball. Like, really dunk it. We know this because, last week, the NHL’S Twitter account shared a video of him throwing down a one-handed jam in Vancouver.
Rielly is 6-foot-1. He’s basically Kyle Lowry with 30 extra pounds of muscle — most of it located in his butt and thighs. So him leaping up and slamming a dunk was more aggressive than graceful. It basically summed up the work Rielly had put in this summer, something that surprised both him and his strength and conditioning coach, who first shared the video.
That’s the end-of-summer level of conditioning Rielly brought to Toronto on Tuesday for his first Leafs optional skate. It felt like the first day of school, as players reintroduced themselves after four months away, or met for the first time.
The optional skates have been going on for some time now at the team’s practice facility. But they don’t feel as optional anymore. Not with training camp less than two weeks away. And certainly not with head coach Mike Babcock now quietly watching from the stands.
What he saw on Tuesday was getting pretty close to what he will see Sept. 12, as Rielly and trade acquisitions Tyson Barrie and Cody Ceci joined a group that included Frederik Andersen, Jake Muzzin, William Nylander, Kasperi Kapanen, Andreas Johnsson and several others.
Auston Matthews has yet to arrive, but he’s coming. As for Mitch Marner, each day has brought forth a new rumour and a new worry, whether it’s spending all of training camp with a team in Switzerland, or waiting until the start of the season for the Leafs to free up the necessary cap space to sign him.
You would think being in Vancouver, where the Canucks are going through a similar situation with Brock Boeser, Rielly would have been able to escape the almost daily chatter.
“You’d be surprised,” he said with a laugh.
If it feels like déjà vu, it’s because Rielly, Marner and the rest of the Leafs were down this same road a year ago with Nylander. He not only ended up missing all of training camp, but also sat out 28 games before he finally signed a new deal Dec. 1.
No one wants that for Marner. At the same time, Rielly knows from the Nylander situation that there’s no point thinking about it.
“We want Mitch here. We want him to be a part of camp. We want him to be involved, but he’s doing what he thinks he needs to do. It is what it is,” said Rielly. “All we can worry about is training camp. So we all have confidence that he’s going to be here at some point. But for now we’re just going to work hard and get ready.”
This is Rielly’s team as much as it is Tavares’ or Matthews’ or Andersen’s.
With Jake Gardiner pretty much gone as a free agent and Nazem Kadri traded to Colorado, the 25-year-old is the longest-serving Leaf. And he’s starting to act like it. He’d be on anyone’s list of potential captains.
Rielly is a legitimate No. 1 defenceman. Last year, he finished third among defencemen with 72 points and was fifth in the Norris Trophy voting. The Hockey News ranked him 33rd among the NHL’S top 50 players, while EA Sports put him 45th with an 88 out of 100 rating in its latest NHL 20 video game.
“Could have been higher,” said Rielly with a smile.
As for this year’s Leafs, Rielly likes what he sees. The team is younger and seems more balanced after losing Kadri, Connor Brown and Patrick Marleau in trades that brought back defencemen Barrie, Ceci and Ben Harpur, as well as forward Alex Kerfoot, who can play on the wing or at centre. Toronto also signed veteran centre Jason Spezza. But at the same time, Gardiner and Ron Hainsey are gone.
Is the team better? That depends on whether Barrie and Ceci are upgrades over Gardiner and Hainsey and whether Spezza and Kerfoot can replace the 32 goals that Kadri and Marleau contributed last year.
And it depends on when Marner returns.