It is mid-afternoon on American Thanksgiving and Morgan Rielly is indeed feeling thankful.
The Maple Leafs have finished practice, so Rielly can spend the rest of the day with his teammates trash talking about their fantasy football league through a full slate of NFL games. And, thanks to the team’s California road trip, Rielly is pleased he can watch the last game of the day, which conveniently kicks off at 5:20 p.m. local time as opposed to 8:20 p.m. in Toronto, with no fear of falling asleep.
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“I can’t make it past halftime,” Rielly said of what it’s like to watch the final game of the day in Toronto. “I’m aging quickly, it feels like.”
At 27, Rielly is far from the oldest member of the Leafs. But over the last two years, he’s noticeably matured, stepping into the next phase of his career.
With 595 NHL games under his belt, he is no longer finding his way, but is instead a bona fide league veteran. He leads all Leafs defenceman with 14 points in 23 games, while averaging more than 24 minutes of ice time a game — close to a career high.
Notably, on Oct. 29, he signed an eight-year contract extension with the Leafs that could keep him in Toronto for the remainder of his NHL career and put him among the franchise leaders in games played.
It was a big commitment to the only NHL team he’s ever played for. Over the course of a 25-minute one-on-one conversation with The Athletic, it is clear Rielly’s decision was influenced as much by experiences off the ice as developments on it.
“I feel more comfortable in my skin, I feel more comfortable with who I am as a man and my moral compass and what things I stand for,” he said. “That’s just come with age, experience, maturity and time.”
Morgan Rielly had long believed no other NHL organization could treat him as well as the Leafs since he was drafted fifth in 2012. Yet if there was something that made him realize he wanted to wrap up his contract extension, it might have been a series of conversations this summer.
Rielly alluded to as much when his extension was announced, telling reporters that as he’s gotten older, “you start to feel passionately about your job.”
Over the summer, the wisecracks about the Leafs came fast and hard from friends, exacerbated by the Leafs’ blown 3-1 series lead over the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the 2021 NHL playoffs.
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Being the longest-serving current Leaf means these comments are nothing new. But this time, they struck a nerve with the normally even-keeled Rielly.
“I found myself getting really defensive about my teammates and Toronto,” Rielly said. “And I think that’s when it really clicked that this team means a lot to me, and this game means a lot to me. It’s arguably the most important thing to me.”
He was continually reminded of those feelings every time he saw construction workers with Maple Leafs stickers on their helmets in downtown Toronto.
“That kind of stuff pulls on my heartstrings now because of the time I’ve spent within Toronto,” he said. “It just grows on you. And it just becomes a part of your identity. I take a lot of pride in being a member of a team. That kind of emotional attachment is great. It’s been a real joy of my life, to be honest.”
Which is why, even if Rielly likely could have fetched a higher AAV on the open market than the $7.5-million he’ll get from the Leafs, he wanted to call Toronto home.
“My heart is in Toronto, and I know there’s people close to me that don’t completely understand that because most people that grew up on the West Coast always had that kind of attachment and want to continue to go back. But for me, I’m a Toronto guy. That’s where I’m happiest.”
And with the extension, Rielly sees himself settling into the next stage of his career; though he has yet to shed his baby-faced smile, and perhaps he never will, he is now comfortable calling himself a veteran.
An old man?
Rielly laughs, and wants to clarify: “My body feels good.”
But life still looks far different for Rielly these days. He talked about these differences in a March 2020 Instagram Live appearance with Arkells lead singer Max Kerman.
Not only was the appearance one of his first in public with his girlfriend, Olympic gold medallist Tessa Virtue, but it also offered a glimpse into his transition into being a veteran.
“I can’t keep up with the young kids,” he said at the time of his video gaming habits compared to his teammates.
Rielly can only shake his head when he thinks back to the beginning of his career when he lived with former Leafs teammate Jake Gardiner and would spend his offseason crashing at his parents’ West Vancouver home.
“Those days seem like they’re an eternity ago,” he said.
Never is that more clear to him than in his day-to-day life now. Rielly previously admitted he’s always been comfortable — and almost preferred — being alone, spending his time away from the rink watching movies and playing video games. Today, though, he’s not on his own. While he prefers to keep most details of his life with Virtue private, his perspective has clearly shifted.
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“Now having a partner at home, there’s a lot more talking, a lot more learning from other people that you might be spending time with,” he said.
In 2020, Rielly and Virtue welcomed a puppy, Zoe, into their lives.
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Rielly used to think about what made him, and him alone, happy. He’s realizing more and more that his own happiness comes from making sure his partner and his dog are happy as well.
“I spend so much time thinking about the dog, and what needs to be done to make her happy. I know it’s stupid, but there are just more moving parts. And I’ve just learned to really enjoy that,” he said.
That last sentence is one he uses multiple times, about multiple topics, in our conversation.
His weeknights most definitely look differently than they did a few years ago, when Rielly would leave his Queen St. West apartment to spend his evening alone at a local restaurant.
“I cook a lot more than I used to,” said Rielly.
His arsenal is protein heavy: fish, pork chops and chicken burgers.
“When you can have a glass of wine, cook and play some music, I think that’s a great way for me to spend a night before a game as opposed to eating out as much as you do when you’re a younger player,” said Rielly.
Over the past year, he’s been on a Gordon Ramsay binge on YouTube.
“He’s a pretty good teacher,” said Rielly.
He’s learning from his co-workers, too. In that Instagram Live appearance, Kerman asked Rielly what he was reading. While Rielly mentioned he was reading a book that GM Kyle Dubas had given him, he declined to provide the title, believing Dubas had only given him the book because it highlighted some of Rielly’s flaws.
Nearly two years later, he reveals the book was Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday, a work aimed at helping readers conquer their tempers and minimize distractions.
“What’s on my mind on a day-to-day basis has changed a lot,” Rielly said. “And that requires work. And effort.”
Rielly has also grown more comfortable trying to pass on lessons to younger teammates.
The top-pair defender is at one end of the Leafs defence core. At the other end are 22-year-old Timothy Liljegren and 21-year-old Rasmus Sandin, two offence-minded blueliners who have shades of Rielly in their game, but combined have a little over one full NHL season of experience.
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Rielly understands the pressures that come with being heralded as the next answer for the Leafs blue line. What he finds himself telling Sandin and Liljegren is that, despite the expectations, “nobody’s perfect.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he tries to remind them. “Don’t waste nights thinking about mistakes.”
It’s easier said than done.
“When I was younger, my mentality was a little bit too mistake focused,” Rielly explained.
There will be moments when he comes across an old Leafs game being replayed on TV, and he is struck by how “conservative” his game is.
“I could have taken more risks, but I didn’t,” Rielly said. “And I think for those guys, they should just go out there and play with all the confidence in the world and just know that their teammates are going to have their back no matter what.”
Early in his career, his first NHL coach (Randy Carlyle) was fired as the team cratered to their worst 82-game season in nearly 20 years. The tank then started rolling during his third season.
“So it was hard to be positive at times,” Rielly said of his mindset at that point. “That might have had something to do with it. But I would encourage players like (Sandin and Liljegren) to just try to make plays and not worry about making mistakes because they’re both going to be great. And I think that the best way to learn and to grow is to make mistakes and learn from them.”
Rielly exhales as he answers, and then takes his time to consider the answer to the next question, and the one after that.
This is also a change from a few years ago. He was always cordial with Toronto’s media, but he didn’t always seem to have the same foresight in his approach. Like so much of Rielly’s personality now, that’s come with age.
There was foresight in his decision to stay with the Maple Leafs, which will likely end up defining his career.
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Perhaps he could have signed with a team with a different outlook, one not wearing the shame of five straight seasons with a talented group that was unable to get out of the first round of the playoffs.
“I never looked at it like it was a hurdle that we couldn’t get over,” Rielly said.
Like so much of his life now, he didn’t want to enter the next phase of his career on his own. He takes more pride than ever in his teammates. And that in turn makes him feel that much better about the Leafs having won 14 of their last 16, arguably the best run of Rielly’s career.
He’s old enough to know that not all good things last forever. But he’s learned about the benefits of optimism. It’s that attitude that kept him in Toronto, thinking about the teammates he’s grown close to. And it’s that attitude he believes will eventually help deliver the Leafs the success that’s eluded them.
“I do dream of the day when we’re able to look back on these past playoff runs, smile and say, ‘You know what, I think that was important in the grand scheme of things to go through those losses.’ And we’ll only be able to do that if we do end up accomplishing our goal of being a great team for a long time. If we never get there, then we’ll look back and we’ll say what a missed opportunity we had,” said Rielly.
“But I choose to think the other way,” he continued. “I choose to think positively. We’re going to learn from these mistakes and these letdowns and we’re going to get stronger.”
(Photo: Kevin Sousa / NHLI via Getty Images)
