Two Toronto Maple Leafs Players Reach Milestones

The Toronto Maple Leafs’ play as of late has been absolutely putrid.

This is if you go without sugarcoating anything. The Toronto Maple Leafs have simply not been playing good hockey over the past few games.

Neither goalie has been doing well and the team has been forgetting to show up for at least 90% of the game. They’ve allowed 23 goals over their past four games and have often found themselves behind on the scoreboard early in games.

However, through all of this, they’re still fifth place in the NHL. And they’ve been finding success in other ways.

John Tavares

Saturday night’s game against Ottawa was one to forget. They lost 6-2 at the hands of their rivals, and once again didn’t show up to play while Ottawa was firing on all cylinders. However, the Maple Leafs reached a pair of milestones that night.

The first John Tavares reaching 40 goals for the first time in his career.

Now, to be fair, Tavares’ actual milestone came when he scored his 39th goal as his previous career high was 38. But you could call Saturday’s goal a milestone as well seeing that it marked his first ever 40 goal season. Of course Islanders fans wouldn’t care about this. They don’t need him, as they love reminding us every six minutes, and they don’t care that he left even though we’re still hearing the chirps eight months later.

Anyways, Johnny T has seen tons of success this season, being paired with Mitch Marner for the vast majority of the year. With 79 points in 72 games this season, Tavares needs eight points in the final ten games of the season in order to pass his previous career high of 86, which he set in the 2014-15 season. As long as him and Marner stay together and he keeps up the consistency he’s played with, this should be an easy feat to accomplish.

Morgan Rielly

The second milestone from the night was Morgan Rielly scoring his 20th goal of the season, absolutely crushing his previous high of nine goals. With the goal, Rielly joins Toronto Maple Leafs alumni Ian Turnbull and Al Iafrate as the only Maple Leafs defensemen to score 20 goals in a season.

Rielly probably has my favorite story of any current Leaf. I don’t agree with Brian Burke on a lot of things, but when he said that they had Rielly ranked number one in the 2012 NHL Draft, he was definitely on to something.

At the very least he was right about Rielly being a better pick than Nail Yakupov, Ryan Murray, Alex Galchenyuk, and Griffin Reinhart.

Anyways, I would like to think that Rielly’s development truly started in the first season that Mike Babcock was head coach. He chose to give Rielly top penalty kill minutes and shield him from powerplay time in the first two seasons he was behind the bench in an effort to get him to focus purely on his defensive game.

This showed up on paper too as Rielly put up 36 points and 27 points respectively. Obviously shutdown defense wasn’t what the Leafs drafted him for, but it gave him some time to round out his game in all aspects. The following season, in 2017-18, he started to give Rielly some more powerplay minutes. Still second unit behind Jake Gardiner, but we started to see much more production from him as he put up 52 points that season.

And this year, well we all know about how Rielly is doing. He’s earned first unit powerplay minutes along with guys like Auston Matthews, John Tavares, and Mitch Marner, and as a result has absolutely exploded offensively with 20 goals and 68 points in 72 games.

The bottom line is, Rielly has worked so hard during his time in Toronto and has finally got to break out of his shell and show the fans what the Maple Leafs drafted him for.

To see him reach 20 goals and play like this all year has been an absolute treat and I think I speak for all Leafs fans when I say I truly hope he wears the blue and white for the entirety of his career.

Through the bad and the good this season, the Toronto Maple Leafs have a lineup that absolutely oozes talent, and we shouldn’t take it for granted.

If you ever find yourself screaming at the TV or punching a hole in your wall because Andersen lets in a bad goal, ask yourself this – would you rather be watching the team from 5 years ago that featured a core of Phil Kessel, Dion Phaneuf, and James Reimer? Exactly.

Thanks for reading.