2018 Top 25 Under 25: Morgan Rielly is #4

Morgan Rielly is a beautiful jewel with a flaw in it.

It’s still beautiful, but we all have to learn to live with the imperfection.

Almost all players of value are of the flawed variety. There are very few who are so good that their drawbacks aren’t worth talking about. With Rielly, the flaw is made more visible because he sits at the top of the hierarchy of Leafs defenders. As the eye climbs the list, looking for perfection, it’s not there to be found.

Rielly was not very good in the playoffs last season. He was particularly not good in the first two games, and I think I’ve been looking at the flaw too much and forgetting the context of the rest of the jewel since then.

But his defensive weaknesses are not imaginary, and there isn’t a perfect setting yet on the team to show this jewel off in.

Yet, we were nearly unanimous in how we voted, and the community agreed.

Let’s turn the flaw to the back and look at Morgan Rielly from his best side for a bit.

Watch Rielly on this Tyler Bozak goal from Game 5. He is playing defensively at the very beginning, but with a mind to the transition. His mind is always on the principle purpose of the game: scoring goals. He looks tired here, and yet he’s in place to join the rush up ice when the quick transition is achieved — this is the hardest neutral zone to get through. He grabs a drop pass, flicks it to Bozak who is also in exactly the right spot, and goal.

Offence, for a defenceman, isn’t about personal shooting or goal-scoring (Brent Burns excepted). Offensive impact is much more often something like that goal, where Rielly is a full participant in moving the puck into scoring position on the stick of a forward.

Goal-scoring skill is rare. If a kid has it, really has it, they won’t stay a defender for long. So it’s normal to expect defenders to score fewer goals per shot than forwards do. Take that a step farther, and if you want good offensive decision-making on the ice, you want the defenceman to shoot only when he should. Morgan Rielly’s career shooting percentage is less than three per cent, and yet he is a potent offensive force.

Hockey is about risk. It’s about making decisions about where to go, what to do, when to shoot, when to pass, and all of those decisions are made by weighting the possibility of a goal for vs the risk of a goal against. Corsi is the only measure we have of decisions players make. Every Individual Corsi For counted for a player is a moment when he decided to shoot the puck. Every On-Ice Corsi For or Against is a moment when someone on that ice decided to shoot the puck.  Those decisions are the core of the game.

Not every shot goes in, in fact, hockey is a game of failure. Auston Matthews has decided to shoot the puck 594 times in his NHL career at five-on-five in the regular season. He has 56 goals. Some of those shots were blocked or saved by the goalie and become rebounds that become goals, but not many of them. So if Matthews fails that much, how often should a defenceman shoot the puck?  This is the Goldilocks question. When is the porrige just right? There really is only one person who can decide, leaving aside all of the analytics-fuelled advice of coaches, only Rielly can decide when and where to shoot.

He is more creative and versatile than Jake Gardiner. If we had more from Travis Dermott, we’d know better who he favours, but it’s one of the two. (Note: you can’t see all shots by location because the NHL records blocked shots at the location they were blocked.)

Now for some numbers: Expected Goals For, which is all unblocked shots weighted by quality to measure the overall offensive power when a player is on the ice. I’m going to use the RelT variety which weights this for quality of teammates. Rielly, this past season, played a very normal quality of competition compared to his more recent seasons. And naturally as a high-minute defender, he plays a lot with the best forwards on the Leafs which is what really affects a player’s individual results. It pays to remember when having these conversations that the Leafs generally have three offensively gifted scoring lines. So in terms of offence, the defenders nearly always have high-quality teammates with them on the ice.

Here’s the whole team with over 300 minutes played:

Maple Leafs 2017-2018 Regular Season at 5-on-5

Travis Dermott’s results are very interesting, and that is the number one reason why I think he shows the ability to be more than a third pairing player; it’s just a matter of time. But Rielly is the offensive axle the team turns on.  This is the beautiful part of the jewel. Forget his personal goals or assists or how and when he chooses to shoot or pass, this is the Leafs succeeding at generating chances to score, both in quantity and quality when Morgan Rielly is on the ice.

While RelT is an attempt to adjust for teammate strength, it’s not perfect, and anyone would be forgiven for wondering if Ron Hainsey looks so good here because his job offensively is to stand on the right point and not make any mistakes while Rielly does his thing. Rielly played the most stable partnership on the Leafs defence with over 1,000 minutes on the ice with Hainsey. He did play some scraps of time with everyone else, and one notable scrap is 41 minutes with Dermott.

I feel like I remember every second of those minutes because the first time I noticed it, I yelled out, “Mike, what the hell are you doing!”

The answer was gambling hard on the offensive power of Rielly and his mini-me both in the offensive zone. Together, they had an absolutely hilarious 81 per cent offensive zone faceoff percentage. There is a slightly less hilarious, but still noticeable skew to Rielly’s ice time with James van Riemsdyk, and it’s a lot more minutes. Their Corsi For percentage together was 59. They outscored their own prodigious weaknesses, but they were a four goals per game duo.

The Leafs won that playoff game in the highlight above 4-3.

What Rielly shows is that, used offensively with offensive-minded teammates, he is glorious. That gem up there doesn’t glitter bright enough to describe it. But with Kadri or the fourth line, there was nothing but struggle.

Speaking of struggle … now we’ll bravely look at that flaw head on.

Maple Leafs 2017-2018 Regular Season at 5-on-5

What you should notice is that van Riemsdyk and Bozak stay up on the good end of this list because they’re forwards, and Mike Babcock ably mitigated their defensive weakness by usage, because he was willing to let someone take the nasty job of covering for them like Kadri did all year.

Morgan Rielly is on the bottom. And he’s there because, to be blunt about it, he’s one of the worst defenders in the NHL at defensive execution and at suppressing shots against. He’s not on a team that’s going to stage an intervention on him either.

Now we’re talking about the setting for this flawed jewel. There’s two aspects to it. There is his defensive partner, which I think we all tend to overestimate the importance of. There is then the three forwards he’s playing with, and they are the trouble makers, much more so than his opposite number on defence. If the forwards can’t execute within the defensive zone very well, if they can’t execute a zone exit, if they have very few successful strategies to move through the neutral zone when it’s patrolled as ably as the [insert your favourite insult] Bruins do, then one man isn’t the whole of the problem.

But he’s not helping.

However, the single biggest part of Rielly’s failures defensively were absolutely his time on the ice with Leo Komarov first and Nazem Kadri second. Having a Kadri line that works more effectively is going to make all of the top four defenders look like they’re suddenly a lot better. Having some line, or a group of them, succeed more in the toughest matchups will also help. It’s not really possible to minimize Rielly’s minutes in the defensive zone unless the entire team gets better at getting out of there.

Oh, and there is that guy, John something, I hear he’s good.

It’s easy to say that just porting in a right-shooting defensive genius to be named later will sort this all out. It’s not going to hurt, that’s for sure, even if it’s not going to happen. I think the rebuild of the Leafs began the day they drafted Rielly back in 2012. For better or worse, the Leafs have this particular player as their top defender, and he has particular faults. The trick is going to be building the team around him, both in personnel, usage and tactics to make his strengths outweigh his flaws in the playoffs against tough to play against teams.

If Morgan Rielly is the man at the top of your defensive structure for years to come, you aren’t ever going to be that dull team that wins 1-0 games. So, pedal down, score early, score often, watch for Rielly to pass the puck, and tip your goalie. That’s who the Leafs are:  Captain Morgan’s team.