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Evaluating Mike Reilly's Early Play in Ottawa |
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It’s fair to say that fans of the Ottawa Senators were a little bit surprised when the team traded Andrew Sturtz and a 2021 fifth-round pick to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for defenseman Mike Reilly. The price to acquire wasn’t shocking, but the idea of picking up a depth defender with term remaining on his contract seemed a little bit strange given all the young bodies in the system. With that said, it would be incredibly unfair to judge Reilly because of questions around the circumstances of his arrival. The real question is how he has fared since joining the Senators.
On that note, there is one word that immediately jumps to mind about Reilly’s play after nine games in Ottawa: Quiet. For a lower-pairing defenseman, that’s generally a good thing. I haven’t noticed Reilly on more than a handful of occasions, which probably means that he’s doing his job well. If ice time is any indication, D.J. Smith would seem to agree; Reilly has consistently been in the 16-23 minutes-per-night range since jumping over from Montreal, where he wasn’t playing nearly that much.
When a player goes about his business quietly like Reilly has done (at least by my eye), it can often be difficult to assess with any degree of certainty what the underlying numbers might say about his play. In Reilly’s case, both the eye test and advanced stats seem to agree that he's been solid:
As the tweet says, the sample size here is small; however, it’s still refreshing to see a defender on this team put together a run of games on the right side of 50% in both of those categories.
Now, it’s true that more than half of Reilly’s five-on-five minutes with the Senators have come alongside Dylan DeMelo. Frequent readers know how strongly I feel about the impact that DeMelo has on his teammates and their ability to drive play, so there might be some concern or question about Reilly’s ability to contribute away from The Great One. It’s impossible to draw conclusions from such a small sample, but the early returns are once again promising on that front:
The bottom line here is that the Senators have to be at least reasonably happy with what Mike Reilly has brought to the table since being acquired. If the goal was to have him come in and play NHL-quality minutes while the injury situation fixed itself, then ‘mission accomplished’. What his role is with this team moving through the rest of this season and into next remains to be seen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Ottawa Senators Blogger • 
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