Morgan Rielly — Mr. Toronto — finally gets his moment with the Maple Leafs

It was just before the start of the playoffs last spring that Morgan Rielly and I got to talking about Toronto.

How much the city had come to mean to him. How he had grown up here. He was drafted by the Maple Leafs in 2012 and made his debut at 19 the following year in a Randy Carlyle-coached lineup that looked like this.

That would be Spencer Abbott and Jamie Devane if you were wondering. That was the year of David Clarkson’s memorable first season with the Leafs. (He was still suspended when Rielly debuted.)

Rielly has been with the Leafs that long.

His first three Leafs’ teams missed the playoffs and weren’t even all that close. Rielly was there for the rocky (an understatement) 2014-15 season when the Leafs nosedived, Carlyle lost his job, and interim coach Peter Horachek memorably said at one point that the “give-a-s— meter” needed to be higher. (Horachek went so far as to create a “playoff” series for the Leafs’ final regular season games that year. Times were tough.)

Rielly was there for Phil Kessel, Jonathan Bernier, Colton Orr, Frazer McLaren, Joffrey Lupul, and Paul Ranger. He was there for Brian Burke as president and GM of the Leafs and Dion Phaneuf as captain.

Rielly was just a kid back in those days. But he was there. He was there when Lou Lamoriello became the GM. He was there when Mike Babcock was signed to an eight-year contract. He was Babcock’s star student in the 2015-16 season when the Leafs bottomed out and won the right to draft Auston Matthews. Rielly became a Leaf the day before Luke Schenn was traded to the Flyers for James van Riemsdyk. He was still here when Schenn was traded back more than 10 years later.

Rielly was there for all six of the first-round failures that came before the Leafs finally got over the hump against the Lightning.

Rielly was a teenager when he became a Leaf. He’s 29 now, the longest-serving Leaf – by a lot. He’s played nearly 200 regular-season games more than the next closest team member (William Nylander).

(Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA Today)

He’s not the face of the franchise, but he may well be the backbone of it. He signed an eight-year extension in the fall of 2021 that may well make him a lifetime Leaf. He has a chance of becoming the all-time games played leader for the franchise.

Right now, he ranks 14th, one game behind Frank Mahovlich.

Finally winning a round, finally advancing one step closer to the Stanley Cup, may mean more to Rielly than just about anyone with the franchise.

So what, I wondered that day last spring, did Toronto mean to Rielly? Had he adopted it as fully as I suspected?

“This is home now,” he explained. “This is where I live.”

Offseasons too. Rielly had become a full-year Torontonian, leaving his hometown of Vancouver mostly behind.

“I don’t have a place in Vancouver that I call my own,” Rielly said. “That’s where my family is. My parents live there. My brother lives there. So, I’ll always have that connection. But this is home now. That makes me really happy.”

Rielly said he was “extremely grateful” and “proud” to be a Leaf. “The team means a lot to me,” he said. “That jersey means a lot to me. Being a part of Toronto has been really fun. I think your read is right.”

My read was that Rielly had embraced Toronto, and appreciated what made it special. The diversity. All the little pockets, neighbourhoods, parks, restaurants. “I’ve tried to enjoy it from a young age,” he said. “And now it’s really just become home and a part of me, and I definitely feel passionately toward the city.”

Some Leafs stick close to the arena downtown. Rielly lived in Liberty Village at one point. He mostly set up shop in the hip Queen West neighbourhood, near Trinity Bellwoods Park, where you might have spotted him walking his dog or grabbing coffee.

“I think Toronto as a whole is an unbelievable place to live in terms of the diversity, the food, the cool little hole-in-the-wall restaurants and bars,” Rielly said.

Speaking like the local he is, Rielly mused about heading across Queen to Dovercourt, “and even west of there, the cool little places you can go. Even the art and stuff. If you go up to College, like College and Ossington, up by there, up by like Bar Isabel – I think it’s cool. I enjoy that.”

 

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Rielly remembered a visit to New York with the Leafs when he was 19, maybe 20. His dad was going to come along.

“And Cody Franson asked me where we were going for dinner,” Rielly recalled, “and I said Capital Grille. And he gave me an earful because he’s like, ‘You can go to Capital Grille in any American city. You’ve gotta try new things.’

“At the time I thought he was crazy. But then as I moved around Toronto I really started to enjoy that, trying new places. I’m happy that I did that. I try to encourage our young guys to do that.”

When he lived at Queen and Ossington, Rielly would stroll up and down Ossington, one of the city’s coolest streets, “and you go to Union, you go to Boehmer, you go to (La Cubana) and all these places,” he said, listing off local hot spots.

He liked the neighbourhood feel of it all.

Rielly liked to pop into Oyster Boy, next door to the park, and sit with a book and maybe wolf down some fish tacos. “And that was a cool vibe,” he said. “I’d go and have a couple glasses of wine and some oysters and stuff and I would just chill and they didn’t care. It’s just a cool kind of place in that sense.”

Harbour 60 was nice. So was Jacobs and Co. But the city had so much more to offer, Rielly learned.

It’s all a little odd for a kid from Vancouver, where Toronto is not exactly highly regarded (for some anyway). Which made Rielly’s decision to move to the city year-round surprising to those close to him.

It was partly to do with his contract, which lasts until 2030.

“I kinda told myself that if I was gonna be here long term, I really wanted to commit to being around more in the summer, commit to being around the community more – from a personal aspect, from a professional aspect, and from some groups that I want to work with more in person,” Rielly said. “And that helps, having that job security, the certainty that you’re gonna be here – that played a role in it. But that was naturally happening the past couple years anyway.”

Rielly was arguably the Leafs’ best player in their Round 1 win over the Lightning. He scored eight big points. He averaged a team-high 24 minutes per game. He blocked 17 shots. The Leafs throttled the Lightning 9-3 at five-on-five when Rielly was on the ice. The Leafs won almost 60 percent of the expected goals when he was out there with Schenn – picked four years previous, also with the No. 5 pick.

“Rielly had an unbelievable series,” Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said afterward.

For himself, for his team, for Toronto, you can be sure it all meant just a little bit more.

(Top photo: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)