Rielly-Raddysh Pairing Is Jim Hiller's Biggest Gamble Yet in Leafs Camp

Jim Hiller Has Settled on a Rielly-Raddysh Pairing, and He Knows What It Costs

The Rielly-Raddysh pairing is no longer a camp experiment. At Monday’s practice at Ford Performance Centre, Jim Hiller put Morgan Rielly alongside Darren Raddysh again, and afterward he explained the thinking plainly enough that it should be treated as the plan rather than a look. Toronto intends to open the season with two puck-moving, offence-first defencemen on the same pair, deployed heavily in the offensive zone, and attached to the top six forwards.

It is the single most aggressive structural decision Hiller has made in his first camp, and it tells you more about how he intends to coach this team than any line combination has. It is also, by any honest reading, a gamble.

Hiller’s stated rationale has three parts. Rielly skates. Raddysh shoots. And both have, at different points in their careers, been asked to play shutdown minutes and managed it. From there he gets to the conclusion: put them together, tilt their starts toward the offensive zone, give them shifts with Auston Matthews and William Nylander, and let the pair be an advantage rather than a liability to be hidden.

The Clean Slate for Morgan Rielly

The other half of Monday’s message was about Rielly specifically. Hiller said he understands why people soured on the longest-serving Maple Leaf, said he does not see what they see, and used the phrase "clean slate." Coming from a coach who spent this summer watching Rielly’s name cycle through every trade rumour in the league, that is not a throwaway line.

Rielly is 32 and entering his 14th season in Toronto. The 2025-26 season was the worst of his career by most public measures, his role shrank, and by spring the consensus around the fanbase had hardened into something close to contempt. He was nonetheless still here when camp opened — a fact our readers have followed through a long summer of rumours that never produced a serious offer.

What Hiller is doing is the only sensible thing available to him. Rielly has a full no-movement clause and $7.5 million of cap hit. He is not going anywhere in September. A coach who treats him as damaged goods gets a damaged player. A coach who hands him the top pair and a defined offensive job at least creates the conditions for a bounce-back — and, not incidentally, rebuilds whatever trade value exists if Chayka wants to revisit the market in December.

Darren Raddysh Was Signed for Exactly This

Raddysh arrived in a sign-and-trade with Tampa Bay after a career-best offensive season, and the eight-year term Toronto attached to him was always about one thing: shot volume from the blue line. He gets pucks through. He is the kind of defenceman who turns a stalled power play into a sequence of second chances, which is why he has been at the centre of every conversation about fixing a power play that finished 25th.

What Raddysh is not is a shutdown defenceman. He has played those minutes; he has not thrived in them. Pairing him with Rielly means Toronto is choosing not to ask him to. Earlier in camp Hiller had Raddysh next to Oliver Ekman-Larsson, a combination that read as a way to split the offensive load across two pairs. Monday’s look concentrates it instead.

The trade-off is obvious: if Rielly and Raddysh are together, the defensive burden lands somewhere else. That somewhere else is Jake McCabe and Chris Tanev, who are 33 and 36 respectively and who spent last season absorbing more hard minutes than either should be asked to absorb again. Toronto’s blue line is not deep enough to make this a clean division of labour.

Why the Offensive Zone Deployment Matters

Hiller’s plan is not simply "play these two together." It is "play these two together in the offensive zone with the good forwards." That is a real coaching lever and it changes the math considerably.

Zone starts do not turn a bad defensive pair into a good one, but they meaningfully shrink the number of defensive-zone faceoffs the pair has to survive. If Rielly and Raddysh get the bulk of their starts after a Toronto offensive-zone draw, alongside Matthews or Nylander, they can be a genuine problem for opponents and still finish the night at even strength. The model works. Tampa used a version of it with Raddysh. Colorado has run versions of it for years.

The risk is that a top pair, by definition, plays a lot of minutes, and not all of those minutes can be scripted. Injuries, penalty kills, late-game situations and back-to-backs all erode the coach’s control over deployment. The more the pair plays, the more it gets exposed to the situations it is being protected from.

What Changed Between Week One and Week Two of Camp

Toronto opened camp on Sept. 11 with 73 players and 25 defencemen, an unusually large blue-line group that gave Hiller room to try combinations without consequence. He used it. Rielly skated with Emil Andrae early. Raddysh spent time with Ekman-Larsson. Nick Blankenburg came in on a professional tryout as a ninth defenceman. None of it meant much on its own.

What has changed is the sample. Toronto has now played preseason games, cut 30 players to the Marlies, and is down to 32 in camp. When a coach reaches for the same pair in the second full week, after the roster has been trimmed and the games have started, it stops being exploration and starts being a decision. Hiller volunteering the rationale unprompted is the confirmation.

There is also a competitive logic here that gets lost in the individual evaluations. Toronto’s blue line last season was structurally unbalanced: it had one defenceman capable of driving play with the puck and several capable of surviving without it. Adding Raddysh gave Chayka a second. Splitting the two across pairs would have produced two mediocre units. Concentrating them produces one dangerous unit and one defensively sound one. That is usually the better distribution when your depth is thin.

The Penalty Kill Question Nobody Has Answered

If Rielly and Raddysh are the offensive pair and McCabe and Tanev are the shutdown pair, the penalty kill becomes the pressure point. Tanev and McCabe cannot kill every minute of it at 36 and 33 across an 84-game schedule, which is longer than any regular season this league has played. Someone else has to take shorthanded minutes, and the candidates are either young, new, or both.

This is the quiet cost of the deployment plan. Protecting a pair in five-on-five zone starts is easy on a whiteboard. Protecting it on the penalty kill, on the road, in the second half of a back-to-back in January, is not. Hiller has not said how he intends to handle it, and it is the most reasonable follow-up question available to anyone covering this team over the next week.

Our Take: The Right Gamble, at the Wrong Position

LeafsLurker has been consistently sceptical of the Rielly bounce-back story, and Monday does not change that. But Hiller’s reasoning is better than the reflexive criticism it will attract.

This is a team that scored enough last season and could not defend, and whose goaltending projects to be the worst input any club took on this summer. Hiller cannot fix the crease. What he can do is build a structure that generates more offence from the back end and shortens the amount of time the puck spends in Toronto’s zone. A Rielly-Raddysh pair, properly deployed, does that.

The honest objection is not that the pair is too offensive. It is that Toronto does not have a credible answer for the minutes this decision pushes onto McCabe and Tanev. If either misses time, the whole structure collapses into Rielly playing 23 minutes a night in every situation — which is the exact scenario that produced last season’s reputational damage in the first place.

What’s Next

The Maple Leafs have preseason games remaining against Ottawa this week before the Sept. 28 roster deadline and the Sept. 29 opener against Montreal at Scotiabank Arena. Watch whether Hiller keeps Rielly and Raddysh together in a game rather than only in practice, and watch the pairing behind them — if McCabe and Tanev are together against Ottawa’s best, that is confirmation Toronto is committing to the split.

Rielly, who is closing in on 1,000 NHL games, will also be worth tracking on the power play, where Raddysh is expected to run a unit. For the full blue-line picture heading into the opener, see our look at how the pairings were projected before camp, and follow the standings once the season begins.