By rights, the disintegration of Morgan Rielly’s hockey career should have commenced within an hour of his selection at the 2012 NHL Entry Draft. As the old saying goes: Those the gods would destroy, they overhype. Brian Burke stood at the podium and summoned Rielly down to the stage. The Maple Leafs owned the fifth-overall pick and they were taking a defenceman from the Moose Jaw Warriors who was considered a first-round talent, maybe top-10, but who had also missed nearly the entire season with a torn-up knee. What could possibly go wrong? But by the time Rielly made his way down to press row, Burke, the soon-to-be-former Toronto GM, was in his Category 4 bluster and, as per usual, said without equivocation: “We had this kid rated one. Wouldn’t say that if it wasn’t true just to build up the pick, but this is a guy [who] had we had the first pick in the draft, we would’ve taken him.”

Managers are expected to manage not just operations but also, as importantly, expectations. This was the exact antithesis of the old one-game-at-a-time. In a hockey market that routinely eats its young, Burke was announcing: “It’s dinnertime.” The Leafs’ 2008 first-rounder, Luke Schenn, had already played his last game with the club, and the local media had been gnawing away at 2009 first-rounder Nazem Kadri, deeming him at best an enigma who might not stick with the big club or have a lasting impact. But to shift the intense focus onto Rielly, well, that had the makings of a disaster. “The psychological evaluation he did was really off the charts,” Burke said. “Psychological evaluation is often as important as the physical one.”

When Rielly arrived on press row moments later, wearing a Maple Leafs sweater for the first time, he was clearly unaware of Burke’s pronouncements and seemingly ready to put it down as a media prank when the GM’s uncharacteristically effusive quotes were read back to him. Yet he didn’t rattle. He was neither daunted nor impressed by the circumstances. “It’s pretty sweet, to be honest, with all the cameras on,” he said. “It’s pretty cool. I don’t think it will be a big problem.”

Those three uncomplicated sentences pretty well sum up what that battery of psychological tests found: an inability to get too impressed by anything, including himself.