Morgan Rielly is struggling. How do the Maple Leafs get him going?

Morgan Rielly is struggling through one of his worst seasons as a Leaf.

The soon-to-be 31-year-old is on pace for only 35 points.

He hasnt produced this little on a per-game basis (0.43) since he was a 22-year-old in his fourth NHL season still figuring out the league.

Rielly has also been on the ice for a flood of goals against, especially this month 20 in all over 13 games, nine more than any other Leaf defenceman.

(Also on the ice for 20 goals against this month? Auston Matthews .) Can Morgan play better? Yes, he can.

We all know that.

He knows that.

And hes trying to work through it right now, Leafs coach Craig Berube said.

Hes just gotta stick with it and well keep working at it and well try to help him as much as we can.

What might Berube and his staff do to spark the longest-serving Leaf? Here are four ideas that might work.

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Increase his minutes with Auston Matthews What better way to spark Riellys offence than this? In spite of his struggles, no Leafs defenceman has performed better with Matthews this season than Rielly.

At both ends of the ice, the Leafs have excelled in the pairs five-on-five minutes, winning almost 60 percent of expected goals (aka the shot quality battle) per Natural Stat Tricks model.

Not surprisingly, Rielly, the Leafs top offensive defenceman, has tended to do his best work offensively over the years with Matthews, the Leafs top offensive forward.

In the previous three seasons, Rielly posted 33 five-on-five points in the minutes he saw with Matthews more than any other forward.

This season? Rielly has registered only three such points in his minutes with Matthews (who was playing through injury throughout the first half), amid declining opportunity to do so.

Hes been on the ice for about 37 percent of Matthews five-on-five minutes this season, down from around 41 percent last year.

So far in January, Rielly has been on the ice for slightly less than 34 percent of Matthews five-on-five minutes.

When the Leafs lost to the Minnesota Wild on Wednesday night, Rielly logged just under six five-on-five minutes with Matthews, about half as much as Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Chris Tanev .

He spent the bulk of his night playing with the line of Max Domi , Pontus Holmberg and William Nylander .

There are reasons for this.

For one, the Rielly-Matthews minutes in January have been bad: The Leafs have been outscored 4-2, while winning less than 42 percent of expected goals.

Theres also this: As the No.

1 defensive pair of late, Ekman-Larsson and Tanev have been taking on the top-line assignments for the Leafs.

And the line Berube wants (for good reason) to team them up with is the one led by Matthews and all the more so with Holmberg and Fraser Minten centering the second and third lines.

Advertisement Matthews line and the Ekman-Larsson/Tanev pairing have posted positive minutes meanwhile.

Increasing Riellys minutes with Matthews means exposing him to the best the NHL has to offer, including Connor McDavid on Saturday.

And theres risk in that, especially with Rielly in this form.

But if the Leafs want to boost Riellys chances of generating offence, what better way than to pair him up with Matthews more often? Or at least as often as before.

What would make all of this easier ...

2.

Reconnect Rielly with Tanev The Leafs tried this already, right? And it didnt work, right? Wrong! Well, sort of.

This was the plan for the top pairing to start this season.

It didnt make it through October before Berube and assistant coach Mike Van Ryn pivoted, returning to the pairing only once in the many months since.

Heres the thing: The underlying numbers are good, great even, per Evolving-Hockeys model! Among the best at both ends for any highly-used Leafs combo, in fact (min.

100 minutes).

Note the top defensive mark, via that expected goals against number.

Also note that Tanev is the only partner Rielly has found real success with this season.

The problem they had in their all-too-brief connection, at least in part: goaltending.

The Leafs have an .845 save percentage in the Rielly-Tanev minutes this season.

Now the complicating factors.

The coaching staff rightly wants Tanev, their best defensive defender (and one of the best in the league), to play up against other top lines.

Doing so, then, means trusting Rielly to handle those matchups.

And its been evident from very early on that this coaching staff doesnt trust Rielly to do that.

Rielly has admittedly had a difficult time sorting out the Berube way of playing defence, which prioritizes defending the net above all else.

He has posted the worst defensive numbers of any Leafs defender in high-danger attempts.

Advertisement A brief reconnection with Tanev against the Carolina Hurricanes in early January, meanwhile, went disastrously (though goaltending that night wasnt great either).

With that said, Rielly has taken on just these kinds of duties for the Leafs in the past and fared reasonably well.

He and TJ Brodie were, for a time, the teams go-to matchup pairing.

So were Rielly and Cody Ceci once upon a time, as well as Rielly and an end-of-career Ron Hainsey.

In other words, Rielly has shown he can do this and he never had a partner of Tanevs defensive calibre (though peak Brodie wasnt far off).

The Leafs could choose to empower Rielly by playing him with Tanev and playing them against top lines.

In doing so, they would be insisting that Rielly raise his game his attention to detail etc.

to meet the level of the No.

1 defenceman hes paid to be.

In the limited minutes Rielly and Tanev played alongside Matthews, Mitch Marner , and Matthew Knies , the Leafs were dominant, winning almost 70 percent of high-danger chances.

Filling out the rest of the defence would pose some challenges, though theres reason to believe something like this could work: Rielly Tanev Benoit McCabe Ekman-Larsson Timmins If not Tanev, the answer: trade for a defender to play with Rielly.

3.

Urge Rielly to shoot the puck Rielly is still the likeliest Leaf defenceman to score, one of their few actual threats from the back end as a former 20-goal scorer who still leads the group with five goals this season.

He has one goal, however, in his last 37 games.

Part of the problem: Hes not shooting enough.

In the last five games, Rielly has landed one shot on goal in total.

A related problem: Rielly isnt getting enough pucks through to the net when he actually does shoot, especially of late.

During that five-game stretch, Rielly has actually attempted 15 shots.

This month, he has attempted 50 shots, but hit the net only 14 times.

Thats just a 28 percent success rate.

Advertisement For context: Zach Werenski , leading all NHL defenders in goals and shooting the puck a ton, has connected on about 50 percent of his attempts this season.

Berubes offensive strategy, which has all but erased the rush element of Riellys game, depends in part on point shots and the mess they can pose around the net.

Not only do the Leafs, a group that sometimes struggles to score, need Rielly getting more shots through, but they also need him to involve himself in the play more assertively in the offensive zone.

Too many shifts for the team as a whole end with offensive-zone time but not enough actual offensive-zone opportunity.

Rielly is generating only 0.8 points per 60 minutes at five-on-five this season, his lowest mark since the 2016-17 season.

Last season that number was 1.3.

4.

Reinstall Rielly as the point man on PP1 Ill start by acknowledging that this hasnt worked this season.

At all.

The familiar power-play unit of Rielly, Matthews, Marner, Nylander and Tavares has produced just under six expected goals per 60 minutes this season, which is seriously bad.

Last season, that number was 12.8.

The year before that: 13.3.

And thats part of the thinking here.

No, it hasnt worked this season.

But neither has anything else, including the various five-forward units the Leafs have preferred in recent weeks.

Can the Leafs actually trust a group like that in a playoff series? Im skeptical.

Theres a formula here with Rielly thats worked, especially now with Matthews back to normal(ish).

Lets note that the unit Im proposing sunk in the second half and playoffs last season (and the year before that).

Riellys limitations as a shooter were part of the problem.

However, if the goal is to try to get Rielly feeling good and rolling again, why not give him another opportunity to build some confidence via PP1? Hell get more puck touches on offence, which can only help a player endeavouring to find confidence, not to mention some points.

He can also shoot the puck, as we noted, more than before.

Rielly has been the Leafs best, or second-best, player perennially in the playoffs.

The Leafs need to get that guy back.

Some of this might help.

(Top photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images).

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