The Morgan Rielly conundrum…

I don’t know why it is that so many NHL teams, including the Leafs, are constantly tempted to force-feed 18 and 19 year old players into their lineup.  Those who visit VLM regularly know I have, in Leaf terms, talked about this phenomenon ad nauseum over the years.  Many of you know the names I’ve talked about here in this regard.  Jim Benning, Gary Nylund, Al Iafrate are just a few examples. More recently, the much-maligned Luke Schenn fell into this category.

In every instance, the outcome was, if not an unmitigated disaster, pretty much a disaster nonetheless.

So here we are now, and the latest youngster to turn the brass' heads is 19 year-old Morgan Rielly, the number-five overall pick by Toronto in the 2012 entry draft.

Some of you will recall that I was concerned the Leafs would actually include Rielly on the roster this past shortened season—especially given that he had been playing in Moose Jaw all year and most of the team’s veterans, because of the lockout, had but a one-week camp to get ready for NHL play this past January.  The Leafs even said at the time  (Burke, before his ouster) that it was up to Carlyle whether Rielly made the team.  In other words, the door was open—if Reilly was “ready” and good enough, he’d join the Leafs.

I found that shocking—and quite stupid.  But that’s the thinking in the hockey world, and has been for decades.  The heck with any potential long-term consequences to the young player; if a kid shows he’s “ready” today, why not put him on the roster right now?

How so many “smart” hockey executives could be so impatient is baffling, but it is what it is.

There have always been the rare precocious teenagers who were about as ready as they could possibly be to make the jump from junior hockey to the NHL at the age of 18.  In my hockey lifetime dating back to the late 1950s, those names have included Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr (right) and in more recent times Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and of course Sydney Crosby. (There have been many young players, of course, who also made the jump over the years, “ready” or not. Some were successful, others less so.)

Those that I named above were indeed the best of the best.  Despite being young men perhaps not quite fully physically or emotionally “ready”, they were so talented and so driven they could not be overlooked. They made it and never looked back. Unfortunately there are others whose careers have not necessarily benefitted from the quick call-up. (Schenn may be a prime present-day example, in Leaf terms.)

I’m not going to try to say that Reilly isn’t talented enough to play in the NHL.  I've seen him play.  He's really, really good.  For me, though, this is not a talent debate.  And he may be the most mature 19 year-old kid around, I have no idea.  He may even be really strong physically for someone his age, with good lower-body strength and all that (one of the gifts that Orr also had as a young man, which made his transition to the pro game all the more seamless back in 1966…)

But I will say this:  I almost never buy the argument (especially when we are talking about a defenseman) that a young player is “too good” for junior hockey; that he has nothing left  to learn.

Has Reilly led his team to a Division championship?  A Western League title?  The Memorial Cup?   Has he led Canada to a World Junior championship?

I’m not all over his junior career, so maybe he has “done it all” and I’ve missed it.  But unless he has been a captain, mentored younger players, “won” everything there is to win, played injury-free for an extended period of time, etc., can we really say he has “nothing to learn”, nothing more to experience or gain from playing junior hockey?

I know some of you have heard me use this example before, but I remember watching Dennis Potvin (a lot) play junior hockey in the early 1970s.  Now there was a young man who was physically about as ready as you could be to play with men.  But the way the NHL was run in those days, young players were not drafted until; they were 20 years of age.  Could Potvin (who had started, if I’m not mistaken, playing junior hockey at the age of 14) have played in the NHL earlier?  Absolutely. But I’ve never thought for a moment his career was harmed, even in a small way, by his “delayed” arrival to the NHL.  He became a Hall-of Famer, and helped lead the Islanders at one point to four Stanley Cups.

I know, I know, it’s a different time, a different era and we’re talking about the Leafs and their needs right now.  But is Rielly more advanced than Denis Potvin? Larry Robinson?  Zdeno Chara or Nicklas Lidstrom? None of those guys played in the NHL until they were in their 20s.

Hey, I have little doubt Rielly benefited immeasurably from playing with the AHL Marlies in the playoffs this past spring.  And I had no problem with him doing that at the end of his junior season. But does that mean he now needs to play with the Leafs, especially when we have plenty of guys with reasonably impressive NHL experience on their resume in our lineup already?

For my money, Jake Gardiner still has a lot to learn about playing in his own zone at the NHL level.  A year ago he was the Leaf “boy wonder” who could do no wrong.  But injuries and something I can’t quite put my finger on saw him not in Carlyle’s “mix” a lot of the time this past season. Gardiner is a gifted young player, but I will not say he is a surefire superstar, for all his talent.  Not yet.

And Rielly is even younger. And has even more to learn, as well as he sees the game and all that.

I realize—and respect the fact—that many Leaf supporters are dying to see Rielly in uniform with the blue and white.  They don’t see the point of an immensely talented kid wasting his time in junior hockey when he is supposedly “ready” (there’s that word again) to play in the big time.  But I struggle to understand why he would need to be here now, why it’s even a temptation for Nonis and Carlyle to play him in October.  (Yes, Carlyle did it with Fowler years ago in Anaheim, but that doesn’t mean it was the right thing at the time, or the right thing now for Rielly…)

Are the Leafs that desperate that we have to rely on a 19 year-old (who needs to play a lot and develop, not play minimum minutes) to save our defence?

Maybe I’m just hung up on history and the fact that I’ve seen this movie with this franchise so many timed before (and it always ended badly) that I just don’t see the point of even considering it.  Even setting aside the financial benefit of not wasting a year of his entry-level contract before the organization really needs to, is it necessary to expose this young man to the physical demands of the NHL just yet?

Could he handle it? Probably.  Sure.

But I’d just much rather we be in a situation that, once Rielly makes the big club, he never has to look back.  No nine-game trials, no yo-yo back and forth stuff like Kadri experienced for three seasons.  I’d like my young defensemen to be fully “cooked” by the time they actually wear a Leaf sweater, so that by the time they arrive, they never have to go backwards—not to junior hockey, not to the Marlies.  No side steps, no back steps.  I would just prefer that, in this case, Rielly be absolutely, one hundred per cent ready to play here.

I can see lots of benefits to ‘waiting”.  I don't see any to rushing him into the lineup this fall.  But you may disagree. 

I’m all ears.