By Dave Feschuk

Copyright thestar

As Maple Leafs training camp opened Wednesday nobody was suggesting the Maple Leafs have an easy way to replace Mitch Marner and the 102 regular-season points he took with him to the Nevada desert. But head coach Craig Berube quickly spun at least one of the positives as the post-Marner dawned.

“What excites me is I don’t have to hear ‘Core Four’ anymore,” Berube quipped.

Ditto ‘Shanaplan,’ what with departed team president Brendan Shanahan not presiding over a Toronto training camp for the first time since 2013. Maybe there’s a universe in which those absences, and the folks who step into those voids, will set off a chain of events that leads to unprecedented success in the playoffs. Surely the Leafs, 2-for-11 in playoff series since Auston Matthews arrived, are overdue for such a breakthrough.

And if not? Well, with Marner and Shanahan no longer around to blame for the club’s perennial inability to perform in the clutch, the rabble will be in the market for a new scapegoat or two. Auston Matthews is under pressure to prove his recent run of subpar work is more of an injury-related blip than a sign of past-prime decline. Not that it’ll be easy to replace Marner’s presence as Matthews’s favourite setup man. But given Matthews’s repeated claims of full health, it’s not hard to imagine the captain — who put up a career-low 33 goals last season and has scored a paltry four goals in his 18 most recent playoff games — correcting course with a big year.

Not that there aren’t other Leafs in dire need of bounceback campaigns. Exhibit A would be Morgan Rielly, the No. 1 defenceman coming off one of the worst seasons of his superb career. Only Tim Horton, Börje Salming and Tomas Kaberle have played more games on the Leafs blue line than Rielly. And if everything goes as expected, the early days of Rielly’s 13th season will see him pass Kaberle for sole possession of third place on that list.

For vast swaths of last season, mind you, it felt like the longest-serving Maple Leaf was perpetually out of sync. Berube’s insistence that the offensive-minded Rielly remove some of the risk from his game left Rielly too often as a picture of indecision, stumped to locate the sweet spot between stay-at-home steadiness and rush-joining scoring threat.

“I think I overanalyzed things a little bit with a new coach and different structure and trying to take risk out of my game,” Rielly said last season. “And I think I maybe went too far.”

Rielly, of course, has never shied away from owning his shortcomings.

“I did a lot of reflecting over the course of last year and during the off-season, and had some healthy but challenging conversations with a number of people and, most importantly, myself,” Rielly said.

To that end, Leafs general manager Brad Treliving said that in the wake of last season he and Rielly had “an honest chat” about how Rielly might return to form.

“And âI’ll just say it’s something that he took to heart,” Treliving said.

What ensued was an off-season in which Rielly said he made it his mission to “leave no stone unturned to try to bounce back and have a great year.” The GM said Rielly was a regular presence at the team’s Etobicoke training base, which explains why a noticeably leaner version of the blueliner showed up to camp on Wednesday.

“âI don’t know if there was many days that he wasn’t in this facility,” Treliving said. “Real proud of the summer he’s put in; he’s taking it to heart and he’s a big piece for us. Getting Morgan Rielly back to the level that we know he’s capable of will have an impact on our team.”

That’s no doubt an understatement. When the Leafs have been at their best over the past few post-seasons, Rielly has been a central force. In Toronto’s breakthrough first-round series win over the Lightning in 2023, for instance, Rielly was as good as he’s been as a Leaf, racking up three goals and eight points in six games while often playing alongside the steady Luke Schenn. As Berube pointed out Wednesday, for all last season’s struggles Rielly showed flashes of that prowess in last spring’s playoff run, often paired with the reliable Brandon Carlo.

On the other hand, Rielly was also a member of a Toronto leadership group that couldn’t find relevant answers during a pair of 6-1 drubbings in Games 5 and 7 against the Panthers.

The Core Four is no more. The Shanaplan is kaput. But Rielly is among the same-old faces desperate to turn the page by finally writing a better ending.

“I believe it’s always going to be team first,” Rielly said. “But for me, it’s about being in shape, skating, playing to your strengths, being dangerous, shooting the puck, and take it from there.”