The Toronto Maple Leafs will hope to finally put 50 odd years of failure to be this season.
Whenever the new NHL season gets underway, the Toronto Maple Leafs will be in win-now mode with only one goal: winning the Stanley Cup.
Of course there are many things that give hope to this quest, such as how many weird, unusual, and unlikely-to-reoccur events happened in the previous season to prevent any success.
There is Matthews continued evolution, the addition of T.J Brodie and a bunch of depth players, and Nick Robertson’s rookie season to help give hope.
But the one thing that will really drive the Leafs to success is a bounce back season from Morgan Rielly.
Toronto Maple Leafs and Morgan Rielly
Three seasons ago Morgan Rielly broke out for 52 points and a Norris Worthy Season.
Then, two years ago he scored 20 goals, 72 points and was robbed of a Norris Trophy by voters who over compensate for a perceived Toronto media bias by completely ignoring Leafs players for award consideration.
Over those two years only three defensemen played over scored 50 points, played against top competition and has over 50% puck possession. They were Morgan Rielly, Viktor Hedman and Drew Doughty.
Rielly is only 26 and he’ll be looking to bounce back from a down season. Well, a down season by the previous Top Five NHL Defenseman standards he’d previously set for himself.
Despite playing injured for most of the year, Rielly still scored at a 47 point pace, with the Leafs getting almost 53% of the goals when he was on the ice. Rielly has a 51% Corsi, a 52% expected goals rating, and 52% scoring chance rating. (All stats naturalstattrick.com).
He was really good, but not the superstar he was in previous year. This is probably mostly from playing through an injury, but also partly from being used as a top pairing with Cody Ceci under Mike Babcock 22 or so games.
Playing mostly with Ceci didn’t help Rielly at all, but Babcock didn’t even try to shelter them, so that really hurt his game.
This year Rielly should (we assume) be healthy, and for the first time in his career he will be paired with an actual top-pairing NHL defensemen in T.J Brodie.
This should easily place Rielly back into the upper echelon of NHL defensemen with Victor Hedman, Dougie Hamilton and Alex Pietrangelo. If the renaissance occurs as expected, this is just another reason to consider the Toronto Maple Leafs Stanely Cup Favorites once the NHL gets under way.