The Toronto Maple Leafs kicked off day 1 of training camp Wednesday morning at the Ford Performance Centre, their practice facility. While team practices won’t get underway until Thursday, September 19, they announced their training camp roster on Wednesday and held media availability with the leadership group as well as head coach Craig Berube and general manager Brad Treliving.
Among the leadership group is Morgan Rielly. The 30-year-old defenceman is entering his 11th season with the Leafs and his eighth as an alternate captain, and with a couple of new additions on the back end, he’s looking forward to the opportunity to play alongside Chris Tanev, whose rights were acquired by the team in June before he signed a six-year contract with the team. Rielly talked about the familiarity with Tanev, having skated on a pairing with him at the 2016 World Hockey Championships for Team Canada.
“I was talking to him because I don’t exactly remember how it went down. After we traded for him, I talked to him. I think he’s just a great piece, any team in the league that adds Chris Tanev to your d-core immediately becomes much stronger. I had a chance to play with him during the men’s world championships, great guy, great teammate.”
Rielly is too humble and respectful of his teammates, past and present, to say it himself, but Tanev is objectively the best partner that he’ll have played with since joining the team back in 2013-14. He’s often been tasked with skating with players you’d typically find on a bottom pair, including the likes of Matt Hunwick, Ron Hainsey, and Ilya Lyubushkin, and outside of the first couple of years of T.J. Brodie’s deal, he hasn’t had somebody as sturdy as Tanev to allow him to freely play his game.
Overall, though, Rielly is looking forward to the impact that adding Tanev will have on not just the defensive corps, but in the locker room as well.
“The overarching thought is that he made our team better, he improved our d-core, he improved our penalty kill, he automatically made our team overnight better, our d-core better.”
As you would expect, Rielly was also asked about what the mindset of the team was like heading into another season with gigantic expectations lingering over their heads. With only one round win in eight years of the Auston Matthews/Mitch Marner era, this question is going to come up all the time, and he’s no stranger to answering it. This year, he kept it blunt.
Morgan Rielly: “To a degree, it’s Stanley Cup or bust. I think that’s how our group feels. Anything short of that will be a failure.”
— Joshua Kloke (@joshuakloke) September 18, 2024
Rielly is coming off a 58-point season through 72 games with the team, his third-best season offensively since he’s been in the league, and is currently in the fifth year of an eight-year contract extension signed prior to the 2021-22 season.
