Behind Ryan Reaves’ remarkable midseason turnaround for the Leafs (2024)

Ryan Reaves wasn’t supposed to play the night his season turned a corner.

The Toronto Maple Leafs were wrapping up practice ahead of an afternoon flight to Winnipeg, ahead of their final game before the All-Star break, when Calle Järnkrok, standing in front of the net, took a point shot off his left hand.

Järnkrok writhed in agony from what the Leafs would later learn was a broken knuckle. He was suddenly unavailable to play against the Winnipeg Jets, which opened the door for Reaves to enter the lineup for the first time in six weeks at a point when he was wondering whether he would ever play for the Leafs again, period.

There was under a minute left in the first period that January night when Reaves got on the ice for his fifth shift of the game. His legs were feeling good that night. He’d been working at them for weeks. Which is why he got a little jolt of satisfaction when he was able to chase down a “pretty good defenceman” in Josh Morrissey and disrupt his efforts with the puck.

Moments later, thanks to those efforts, Reaves tipped Noah Gregor’s shot past likely Vezina Trophy winner Connor Hellebuyck. It was only his second goal of the season, but the goal was beside the point for Reaves. “The shifts and the way my legs felt and the way I was thinking the game,” is what made him feel alive on the ice again.

“I was like, OK, this is how I expect myself to play, this is how I played before, let’s just stick to that,” Reaves said.

It was the start of what’s been a remarkable, and entirely unlikely, midseason turnaround for the bombastic 37-year-old. And it almost didn’t happen. And not just because of the injury to Järnkrok.

Reaves had fallen into the deepest rut of his career. He wasn’t sure whether he’d ever get out.

It was the first day of 2024 when Reaves declared himself ready to return from a knee injury he’d suffered two weeks earlier in Columbus.

But the Leafs weren’t ready for him to return with the way things had gone to begin the season.

Reaves had played 21 games to that point. The Leafs had been outscored 13-2 when he was on the ice. Reaves’ expected goals mark hung around 37 percent. All this in the early days of a three-year contract. Waivers, a trade, a stint in the AHL, all of it seemed possible for Reaves at that point. Reaves began wondering himself.

He grew frustrated as he continued to practice and not play, all while remaining on the injured list.

A feeling of hopelessness set in.

“I mean, there was a time where I didn’t know if I was gonna touch a sheet with this team again, to be honest,” Reaves said in a lengthy conversation with The Athletic on Friday afternoon. “When you don’t play for so long, you can start running through every scenario. You can start running through, They’re gonna trade me. They’re gonna put me on waivers. They’re gonna buy me out.

“Whatever it is, I think you run everything when you haven’t played for a month and a half.”

Reaves had been an NHLer since 2010. He’d never felt so low.

“I’ve gone through stretches where I haven’t been playing my best,” he said, “but never like, ‘Man, maybe I don’t have it anymore.’ I’ve always been able to work out of it pretty quickly.”

The feeling went home with him. His wife, Alanna, saw a different person. Reaves saw it too. He wasn’t himself. He wasn’t having fun doing anything, and he loves to have fun doing everything. It was part of who he was. Be loud. Bring energy. Drag everybody into the fun.

Suddenly, he wasn’t that guy anymore. “I was just so in my head thinking about what my future looked like,” Reaves said. “You don’t want to take things home, but sometimes it’s hard.”

Then he began to talk. First, with his wife. Then, with Greg Harden, the Leafs’ peak performance coach. And it was after those conversations, Reaves says, that his mentality flipped. He stopped thinking about what could go bad and started to piece together how to make things right.

“Instead of thinking about, ‘Where am I gonna be in a week?’ or ‘Am I gonna be on this team?’ or ‘Am I gonna get another game?’ it was, ‘How am I gonna work my way back in this lineup and stay in it?’” Reaves said.

Everything started to feel better after that. His skating took on a new life. He practised with more confidence. He had fun again with his teammates. And he got to work.

Before practice and sometimes long after, Reaves hopped on the ice with Hayley Wickenheiser, the team’s assistant GM and head of player development, and Nik Antropov, a former Leaf and the player development coach.

They got to work on Reaves’ skating, which looked particularly sluggish and slow in the first half.

Sprints. Cutbacks. “Anything I could do one-on-one with my legs (moving) faster, get them feeling better under more stress,” Reaves said.

That, and getting more touches with the puck so when it did come his way he could do something constructive with it.

Some days, Reaves would enter the dressing room after a post-practice workout upwards of 40 minutes after most of his teammates had left the ice. He’d undo his skates and pull off his equipment while media members awaited coach Sheldon Keefe’s news conference.

Reaves described the experience as a mini training camp that would help turn around his season.

He felt faster, more confident. His efforts began to help the team.

Instead of laying an opponent out with a heavy hit long after the puck was already gone, Reaves suddenly was getting there when the puck was still in the mix. Which meant his forechecking was suddenly effective, which meant his fourth line was suddenly spending most of its shifts on offence and not chasing the game in its own zone.

The puck stopped going in the wrong way — just four times in Reaves’ last 16 games.

That was really messing with Reaves in the early days of his Leafs career.

“Coming on a new team and you look at the stat line and in 10 games you’re minus-10,” he said. “I think that gets in your head where you just met a bunch of new guys and you want to help them out and all of a sudden you’re hoping they’re not looking at you like, ‘Why the hell did we sign this guy for?’

“That definitely lingered a little bit,” Reaves said.

“For sure at one point,” he added, “there was a time where every time I stepped on the ice and we were in the D zone I was like, ‘Just don’t get f—ing scored on. Just don’t get scored on.’ And then when you’re thinking that you get scored on more. Or maybe you don’t get scored on, but you get out of the D zone and you’re just like, OK, good! And you don’t do anything in the offensive zone.”

Reaves was signed in part for his personality, for his ability to lift up the Leafs on the ice and crucially, off of it. But with how things were going in October, November and December, Reaves felt like he couldn’t be that guy, couldn’t be the one to pump up the group.

“That’s the thing,” Reaves said. “I’m also trying to be a voice in the locker room. But I think at the beginning of the year when you’re not playing well it’s hard to tell other guys how to play, right? If I step up when I’m minus-10 in 10 games and I start telling guys, ‘We’ve got to tighten up the D zone’, well, they’re gonna look at me and be like, ‘You can go f— yourself,’ right.”

Reaves is feeling like he can be that guy again now that his game has turned around.

The Leafs have won almost 60 percent of the expected goals when he’s been on the ice since he returned to the lineup that night in Winnipeg.

He describes the difference in how his legs feel as “night and day.” But it’s much more than that. His head is clearer now that his confidence has returned. “I think maybe before,” Reaves said, “even if the legs were there, I’m skating and then I’m hesitating on where I’m supposed to be so then that makes me a step late. And then I’m a little bit out of position so I’m late on the hit.

“Now, I feel like where I’m supposed to be is where I’m going right away. I’m not reacting to, like, trying to think about it. I’m just going there. It’s just coming a little more naturally right now and I think that’s allowing me to arrive on time.”

That was what pleased Keefe the most in Reaves’ performance earlier this week against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Reaves’ “being able to get there on time, make the contacts, and have them be impactful contacts” and then get pucks back for the Leafs.

Suddenly, remarkably given the way the season started, Reaves looks likely to be in the team’s Game 1 playoff lineup. His turnaround was earned. “I was pushing the snowball uphill,” he said, “and now it feels like it’s just going a little bit better.”

— Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick and Hockey Reference.

(Top photo: Julian Avram / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Jonas Siegel is a staff writer on the Maple Leafs for The Athletic. Jonas joined The Athletic in 2017 from the Canadian Press, where he served as the national hockey writer. Previously, he spent nearly a decade covering the Leafs with AM 640, TSN Radio and TSN.ca. Follow Jonas on Twitter @jonassiegel