The Toronto Maple Leafs Must Re-Sign Morgan Rielly

The Toronto Maple Leafs must immediately move to sign their most important player.

The Toronto Maple Leafs best player is Auston Matthews, but their best defenseman and most important leader – the heart and soul of their team – is Morgan Rielly.

Rielly is a purely offensive defenseman who provides basically zero defense, and sometimes he takes criticism for this, but the fact is  he shouldn’t, because hockey is a game that must be viewed holistically – and the overall impact of Morgan Rielly is very strong.

He’s an elite defenseman even with the poor defense, and he’s also by far the best defenseman the team has drafted and developed since the 1970s.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Morgan Rielly

If the Leafs didn’t sign John Tavares, Rielly would be the captain of this team, and given Tavares’ robotic demeanor and complete lack of discernable personality, Rielly probably should be the captain anyways.

Rielly is about to enter the final year of his $5 million dollar deal, and so of course some of the stupidest trade ideas and rumours in the history of sports have popped up around him.

Think about it: most of the complaints about this team are that they sunk too much money into their expensive core forwards.  If that is the case, why would you trade a player who is playing for about half what he’s worth?

At $5 million dollars, a player who is better than 80% of other NHL defenseman over the last three years (according to the stats of the @jfresh player cards) is an extreme bargain.  Nothing you get for Rielly will be more valuable to the team than that.

Rielly is 27, and he is this team’s heart.  He has been here the longest, and he’s the perfect fit with the roster that has been constructed.  The Leafs, after years of suppressing his value with some of the worst players in the NHL as his partner (Ron Hainsey, Codi Ceci) finally went out and got him one of his peers to play with in T.J Brodie.

The results were fantastic.

Rielly goes perfectly with the Leafs high-octane forwards, and Brodie anchors the whole thing. It’s a great set-up and it worked perfectly as the Leafs were competing for the President’s Trophy until the last game of the year despite playing for months with no power-play.

Rielly is going to be great for several more years, and he deserves to win with this group. Trading him would mark the darkest day in franchise history because what is even the point of cheering for a team if they bail on one of the greatest players and people they’ve ever had?

This summer is when Rielly becomes eligible for a contract extension and the Toronto Maple Leafs should make getting that done a top priority.  No one wants or needs to go through a year of rumours and debate about trading him or letting him walk.  He showed his worth in the playoffs, and if a team’s goal is to be a team with character and integrity and not just a collection of millionaire jocks, signing Rielly is automatic.

If there is ever a player who should become synonymous with a team and play his whole career in a single uniform, it’s Morgan Rielly.