NHL Rumours: Toronto Maple Leafs Looking to Re-Sign Morgan Rielly

The Toronto Maple Leafs have 11 free-agents this summer to deal with, but it is a player who still has a year remaining on his contract that the team should be most concerned about.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are currently paying Morgan Rielly an extremely team-friendly $5 million cap hit which makes trading him before he’s a free-agent a non-starter.

Rielly is one of the NHL’s premier defenseman and his deal right now has turned out to be incredibly cheap, which makes it incredibly valuable to the Leafs who are right up against the salary cap.

It is hard to see how someone would pay enough for one season of a player to compensate a win-now team for one of the league’s best contracts.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Morgan Rielly

Since trading Rielly is pretty much not an option, the Leafs can either re-sign him or let him play out the year and then leave next season, an option the team hasn’t been afraid of (to say the least).

Rumours, from none other than Pierre LeBrun (basically the best source possible for this type of thing)  say that the Leafs are looking to re-sign their best defenseman and de facto captain later this summer.

A lot of people underrate Morgan Rielly, which shouldn’t be a surprise.  The NHL media is almost entirely based in Toronto and works overtime to prevent appearances of bias, and Leafs fans constantly overrate gritty players and disparage a long list of finesse superstars (Sundin, Kessel, McCabe, Kaberle, Nylander I could go on and on and on). (Chart from @Jfresh).

Statistically (i.e the only thing that matters when it comes to player opinions) Morgan Rielly is better than 90% of NHL defenseman over a sample size of the last three seasons. That means he is a minute crunching, elite, #1 defenseman, and that anyone who says otherwise is misinformed.

It’s true that Rielly is terrible defensively, but hockey is a game best viewed holistically – that means that you must look at offense and defense together.  As basically the best 5v5 offensive defenseman in the league, Rielly more than compensates for his shoddy defense.  Remember, you can’t be scored upon when you have the puck.

What is even more interesting about Rielly being ranked in the 90th percentile of NHL defensemen, is that he had a rough year last year, so in two of the last three seasons he’d actually come in a bit higher overall.

With Rielly on the ice in this year’s playoffs, the Leafs outshot Montreal 94-42 and had more dangerous scoring chances by a count of 30-12.  It’s a shame the Leafs lost because Rielly was absolutely on fire and was on the verge of truly establishing his star status with a great playoff performance.  The Leafs lost but it was 0% Rielly’s fault.

This past regular season, the Leafs outscored opponents 50-38 with Rielly on the ice,  and if they re-sign him, as they should, and as they are rumored to want to, they can expect this kind of domination for years to come.