Morgan Rielly has five assists over his last five games, and the Maple Leafs need every one of them with Chris Tanev on injured reserve.
Toronto heads into tonight's puck drop in Calgary riding a four-game win streak. The veteran defenseman has been right in the middle of it.
Tanev is out with an upper-body injury and isn't expected back until at least Oct. 31. He's dressed for just six games this season.
Losing a veteran like that usually exposes a blue line. In Toronto's case, it exposed how much Rielly still has in the tank.
He's a plus-3 across that five-game stretch. Not bad for a guy who still carries a minus-2 on the season.
The Leafs are 6-2-2 over their last 10, and Saturday's 7-2 beatdown in Edmonton was the loudest result of the bunch.
Think of the coworker who quietly keeps the office running for years. Nobody notices him until the guy at the next desk calls in sick for two weeks.
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An aging Maple Leafs blue line is one injury away from trouble
Here's what should worry people in the front office. Tanev is 36, and Oliver Ekman-Larsson is 35.
Jake McCabe is 33. Rielly, Troy Stecher and Dakota Mermis are all 32.
That's a bad way to build a defense corps in October, never mind April. John Chayka's group has almost no youth to absorb a second or third injury.
And the second one already happened. Marshall Rifai is also on IR with a lower-body injury, with the same earliest return date as Tanev.
Stecher has helped plug the gap. He's got two game-winning goals this season and went plus-5 over his last five.
The money side tells its own story. Darren Raddysh carries an $8,500,000 cap hit and has six assists, three of them on the power play.
Rielly, at $7,500,000, has nine. So who's really driving the bus back there?
The one hole in his game is the shot. He's still searching for his first goal of the season, and just one of his helpers has come on the power play.
Calgary sits at 4-6-0 with a minus-16 goal differential. But the Flames have won three straight, and this is the first meeting between the teams this season.
After tonight, the road trip rolls into Seattle on Wednesday and Vancouver on Saturday. That Vancouver date happens to be Oct. 31.
If Tanev is ready by then, Jim Hiller faces a real choice. Hand the heavy lifting back to the 36-year-old, or keep riding the defenseman who picked it up without being asked?
Should Jim Hiller keep Morgan Rielly in a bigger role even after Chris Tanev returns?
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