It’s ridiculous to throw the book at Leafs’ Morgan Rielly | Maqvi News

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Dumb: Ridly Greig slammed an F-you, full speed slapshot into an empty net in the final seconds of an emotional win over the Toronto Maple Leafs.

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Dumber: Leafs’ Morgan Rielly, the King of Calm, the King of Cool, never dirty or aggressive, snapped at the combination of losing to lowly Ottawa and having the team’s collective noses shoved in it by Greig’s inappropriate misstep. He raced towards the inspecting Ottawa player and instead of doing the smart thing — like sucker punching him — he momentarily lost his mind and used to stick as a weapon, cross checking Greig to the head.

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And for this, the parody of inconsistency that is the the National Hockey League Department of Player Safety will meet with Rielly in New York on Tuesday — which is usually a sign they are going to throw the book at him.

Throw the book and Morgan Rielly don’t normally belong in the same sentence, let along the same hearing room.

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You don’t throw books at players like Rielly, who happens to read them. He is among the hockey players you should be celebrating most of the time.

He is not among the players who should be suspended for five games or six games or whatever the genius George Parros comes up with on Tuesday. It doesn’t sound good for the Leafs, which is bad for the game and for Rielly and certainly for a Toronto team already pencil thin on defence and will soon be losing their best defencemen for a significant period of time.

There had to be more to the Rielly outburst than just from watching the hockey simpleton who thought an empty net snapshot was an appropriate way to conclude his evening. There was a symbolic chase of frustration in all of this.

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The Leafs had just been beaten by the forever struggling Senators, on a Hockey Night In Canada Saturday night game, and had not played well, not competed hard, had not been structurally sound, and all of the evident flaws of a Leafs team still trying to find itself were glaring.

The game was bad, the ending was worse. And for an out of character Rielly to take on a role that is virtually foreign to him in every conceivable way is indication enough of just how broken the Maple Leafs happen to be right now.

Rielly is an immensely skilled NHL player, an upper echelon offensive defenceman, good enough to be on a lot of lists for Team Canada 2026, and like so many of the upper echelon Leafs, still missing something else in his game.

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It isn’t aggression. You can’t be what you’re not, despite what happened here. It’s positioning. It’s defensive play. It’s gap control and play without the puck. It’s being on the right side of the puck or too often in his own zone, on the wrong side of the puck.

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It’s what prevents Rielly from being in the Norris Trophy conversations that will start this year with Quinn Hughes and Cale Maker. Those players are magic. He is next level magic among NHL defencemen, behind the Charley McAvoy’s and Adam Fox’s and Alex Pietrangelo’s, but well ahead of most of the pack.

What could he possibly say in New York for his in-person hearing with the Department of Safety? The video is rather clear. Greig acted foolishly. Rielly responded foolishly, because some one should have, just not in a stick-to-head kind of way.

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What were you thinking, they will ask? And in that moment, the truth is, he wasn’t thinking.

If he was he would thrown a sucker punch, not attempted a stick to Greig’s head. The punch would have got him a game maybe two. Or maybe a fine. The stick will be getting him two weeks without parole.

You hear this all the time when you’re a parent. Cause and effect. The cause was Greig’s lack of sense. The effect was Rielly, and to use the old Mark Messier term: “I snapped.”

That’s the end of the hearing really. There’s nothing else to say. There’s nothing else to know.

The Leafs have been a turn-the-other-cheek kind of hockey team for most of this era. There is no mean in Auston Matthews or in Mitch Marner or in William Nylander. There is no mean in John Tavares or, historically, in Rielly.

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There is no mean in most of the roster that matters and that is an historical indictment of this era, where oddly, one of the meanest forwards who ever played, Brendan Shanahan, happens to be the club president.

The problem here is that the president is the Leafs meanest player, probably its toughest player and he hasn’t played a game of any kind since 2009.

And now Rielly, a first-time offender, a non-fighter, a Lady Byng candidate some seasons who averages just over 20 minutes in penalties for a season, will get almost no consideration by the Department of Safety for all he’s done in 11 seasons as a model hockey citizen.

Rielly should be embarrassed by his momentary loss of sense from Saturday night. The NHL should be embarrassed as well by this for being blind to history and overt to circumstances. in this case,

Creating way too much from next to nothing.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

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