A look at the exciting summer Maple Leafs winger Ryan Reaves has had so far

The Toronto Maple Leafs fell short of everyone's expectations this past season, including their own. Despite drawing a Boston Bruins team without the likes of Tuukka Rask, Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron in the first round, the Leafs still could not get it done when it mattered, falling in 7 games to the big, bad Bruins, triggering yet another long summer.

Short memories are important in professional sports. When a team falls short of their goals, the onus is on the players, coaches and management team to make whatever improvements they can over the summer to get ready for the next season. For players, it often involves blowing off some steam in between summer training sessions. Nobody in Toronto appears to have done that better than Ryan Reaves this summer.

In a set of photos offered up by Twitter user @itsmitchmarney, AKA Katie, Reaves can be seen celebrating a former teammate's wedding, taking part in an event for player inclusion, and hanging out backstage at Scotiabank Arena with none other than Snoop Dogg.

Reaves did not have a good start to his tenure with the Maple Leafs last season, dropping to a horrid -14 early on, but when he got another opportunity in the second half of the season, Reaves made good use of it, cementing himself as a fixture on the Leafs' 4th line.

He's not getting any younger at 37 years of age, but Reaves does still have some important tools to offer to the group and is a great teammate to the other guys in the locker room, even when he's not dressing for games.

The hope is that Reavo's game doesn't fall off too much this year. If he can get through this one, the Leafs will have a boat load of cap space available to them next summer with the cap expected to rise to perhaps as much as $93M and John Tavares and his $11M cap hit coming off the books. If Mitch Marner does not re-sign or ends up being traded, the cap situation in Toronto will be extremely favourable, so Reavo's $1.35M cap hit will be less of an issue than it is now.

Source for Ryan Reaves info: Hockey DB
Ryan Reaves stats and bio