Morgan Rielly

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

4 goals and 37 assists in 65 games — 41 points — at 21:42 a night. Minus-9, 126 shots at 3.2 per cent, one on the power play, 21 penalty minutes.

51.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,104 minutes, the 60th percentile, with his ice at 46-45 against an expectation of 51.37-47.76.

He started 54.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 69th percentile.

A minus-9 on a club that finished fourth in the league is the number that will follow him around, and the 60th-percentile chance share is a fairer statement of the same thing — though it is still the lowest of the four defencemen who spent the whole season in Toronto and played a thousand minutes.

The Finesse Game

126 shots at a median of 40 feet, with 51 per cent of his attempts from beyond forty and 13 per cent from inside twenty. For a defenceman that is unusually close in, and it reflects a man who joins the rush.

From twenty to forty feet: 46 shots on goal and four goals — 8.70 per cent, on the league rate for defencemen of 8.83. Inside twenty: 18 shots and no goals. Beyond forty: 61 shots and no goals.

All four of his goals came from the mid-slot, and seventy-nine shots on goal from the other two bands produced nothing at all.

A 3.2 per cent shooting percentage against a career 4.7 across 719 games, and 73 goals in ten seasons.

174 tracked attempts, 132 of them wrist shots — a 75.9 per cent share, the highest of any defenceman in this book with a hundred attempts — and only 14 slap. 90.5 mph at the 47th percentile.

So he is the anti-Parayko: almost no slap shots, an ordinary shot speed, a forty-foot median — and the same nothing from range that Colton Parayko got out of 93 long shots on goal with a 95th-percentile shot and the eleventh-highest slap share on any blue line in this book. That is worth stating as the other half of the same finding. The men who never wind up do not do better from the point either.

The 37 assists are the file: 341 career assists against 73 goals, from a defenceman who moves the puck up and joins the play behind it.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 219 pounds, with 3.14 miles a game at the 87th percentile at a top speed of 22.8 mph, the 76th, and 1.2 bursts above twenty a game at the 64th.

Above average on all three, which for a defenceman playing twenty-two minutes at twenty-nine is a good line.

21 penalty minutes in 65 games and 202 in 719 career games — a very low rate, and it comes from a defenceman who avoids contact rather than from one who is never beaten.

He defends with his feet and gives up the body, which at 219 pounds is a choice rather than a limitation, and it is the standing objection to him.

He joins the rush and is regularly caught behind it. That is the trade in every game he plays, and it is why a club with this much skill has never quite settled the pairing above him.

The Intangibles

Fifth overall in 2012, ten seasons, 719 games, 414 points, all of them here.

73 goals and 341 assists, with 72 points in 2018-19 the peak and three seasons above 50.

He is twenty-nine, signed for a long time, and has been the club’s first-choice puck-mover for a decade on a team that has changed almost everything else around him.

A minus-22 for a career on a club that has been good for most of it is the number that needs explaining, and a 60th-percentile chance share out of soft starts is most of the explanation.