Toronto Maple Leafs

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a professional ice hockey team based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. They are members of the Northeast Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). The organization, one of the "Original Six" members of the NHL, is officially known as the Toronto Maple Leaf Hockey Club and is owned by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. (MLSE). They play at the Air Canada Centre (ACC). The Leafs are well known for their long and bitter rivalry with the Montreal Canadiens, and more recent rivalry with the Ottawa Senators. The franchise has won thirteen Stanley Cups, eleven as the Leafs, one as the Toronto St. Patricks, and one as the Toronto Arenas.
Valued at $413 million (2007), the Leafs are the most valuable team in the NHL, followed by the New York Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings.

Team history

Early years (1917-27)
The National Hockey League was formed in 1917 in Montreal by teams formerly belonging to the National Hockey Association (NHA) that had a dispute with Eddie Livingstone, owner of the Toronto Blueshirts. The owners of the other four clubs – the Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers, Quebec Bulldogs, and Ottawa Senators – had enough votes between them to expel Livingstone from the NHA. Instead, they opted to create a new league, the NHL, and effectively left Livingstone in the NHA by himself.
However, the other clubs felt it would be unthinkable not to have a team from Toronto (Canada's second largest city at the time) in the new league. They also needed another team to balance the schedule after the Bulldogs suspended operations (and as it turned out, would not ice a team until 1920). Accordingly, the NHL granted a "temporary" Toronto franchise to the Arena Company, owners of the Arena Gardens. The Arena Company agreed to lease the Blueshirts' players for the season until the dispute was resolved. This temporary franchise did not have an official name, but was informally called "the Blueshirts" by area writers and sometimes called "the Torontos" by fans. Under manager Charlie Querrie and coach Dick Carroll, the Toronto team won the Stanley Cup in the NHL's inaugural season.
For the next season, rather than return the Blueshirts' players to Livingstone as originally promised, the Arena Company formed its own team, the Toronto Arena Hockey Club, which was readily granted full-fledged membership in the NHL. Also that year, it was decided that only NHL teams would be allowed to play at the Arena Gardens.[2] Livingstone sued to get his players back. Mounting legal bills from the dispute forced the Arenas to sell most of their stars, resulting in a horrendous five-win season in 1918-19. When it was obvious that the Arenas would not be able to finish out the season, the NHL agreed to let the Arenas halt operations in February 1919 and proceed directly to the playoffs. The Arenas' .278 winning percentage that season is still the worst in franchise history.
The legal dispute nearly ruined the Arena Company, and it was forced to put the Arenas up for sale. Querrie put together a group that mainly consisted of the people who had run the senior amateur St. Patricks team in the Ontario Hockey Association. The new owners renamed the team the Toronto St. Patricks (or St. Pats for short) and would operate it until 1927. This period saw the team's jersey colours change from blue to green, as well as a second Stanley Cup championship in 1922.
During this time, the St. Patricks also allowed other teams to play in the Arena Gardens whenever their home rinks didn't have proper ice in the warmer months. At the time, the Arena was the only facility east of Manitoba with artificial ice.

The Conn Smythe era
Querrie lost a lawsuit to Livingstone and decided to put the St. Pats up for sale. He gave serious consideration to a $200,000 bid from a Philadelphia group. However, Toronto Varsity Graduates coach Conn Smythe put together an ownership group of his own and made a $160,000 offer for the franchise. With the support of St. Pats shareholder J. P. Bickell, Smythe persuaded Querrie to reject the Philadelphia bid, arguing that civic pride was more important than money.
After taking control on Valentine's Day 1927, Smythe immediately renamed the team the Maple Leafs. (The Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team had won the International League championship a few months earlier and had been using that name for 30 years.) The Maple Leafs say that the name was chosen in honour of the Maple Leaf Regiment from World War I. Another story says that Smythe named the team after a team he'd once scouted, called the East Toronto Maple Leafs. Initial reports were that the team's colours would be changed to red and white, but the Leafs were wearing white sweaters with a green maple leaf for their first game on February 17, 1927 The next season, the Leafs appeared for the first time in the blue and white sweaters they have worn ever since. The Maple Leafs say that blue represents the Canadian skies and white represents snow, but in truth blue has been Toronto's principal sporting colour since the Toronto Argonauts adopted blue as their primary colour in 1873.

1930s: Opening of Maple Leaf Gardens and first Maple Leaf dynasty
After four more lacklustre seasons (including three with Smythe as coach), Smythe and the Leafs debuted their new arena, Maple Leaf Gardens, with a 2-1 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks on November 12, 1931.
Led by the "Kid Line" (Busher Jackson, Joe Primeau and Charlie Conacher) and coach Dick Irvin, the Leafs would capture their third Stanley Cup victory during the first season in their new digs, vanquishing the Montreal Maroons in the first round, the Boston Bruins in the semis and, in the Stanley Cup Finals the hated New York Rangers. Smythe took particular pleasure in defeating the Rangers that year; he had been tapped as the Rangers' first general manager and coach in the Rangers' inaugural season (1926-27), but had been fired in a dispute with Madison Square Garden management before the season.
The Leafs' star forward, Ace Bailey, was nearly killed in 1933 when Boston Bruins defenseman Eddie Shore checked him from behind into the boards at full speed. Maple Leafs defenseman Red Horner was able to knock Shore out with a punch, but it was too late for Bailey, who was by now writhing on the ice, had his career ended. The Leafs would hold the NHL's first All-Star game to benefit Bailey.
The Leafs would reach the finals five more times in the next seven years, but would not win, bowing out to the now-defunct Maroons, the Detroit Red Wings in 1936, the Chicago Black Hawks in 1938, Boston in 1939, and the hated Rangers in 1940. At this time, Smythe allowed Irvin to go to Montreal to help revive the then-moribund Canadiens, replacing him as coach with former Leafs captain Hap Day.

1940s: A second decade of success
Toronto looked sure to suffer a similar fate in 1942, down three games to none in a best-of-seven final in 1942 against Detroit. However, fourth-line forward Don Metz would galvanize the team, coming from nowhere to score a hat trick in game four and the game-winning goal in game five, with the Leafs winning both times. Captain Syl Apps had won the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy that season, not taking one penalty and finishing his ten-season career with an average of 5 minutes, 36 seconds in penalties a season. Goalie Turk Broda would shut out the Wings in game six, and Sweeney Schriner would score two goals in the third period to win the seventh game 3-1.
Apps told writer Trent Frayne in 1949, "If you want me to be pinned down to my [biggest night in hockey but also my] biggest second, I'd say it was the last tick of the clock that sounded the final bell. It's something I shall never forget at all." It was the first time a major pro sports team came back from behind 3-0 to win a best-of-seven championship series.
Three years later, with their heroes from 1942 dwindling (due to either age, health, or the war), the Leafs turned to lesser-known players like rookie goalie Frank McCool and defenseman Babe Pratt. They would upset the Red Wings in the 1945 finals.
The powerful defending champion Montreal Canadiens and their "Punch Line" (Maurice "Rocket" Richard, Toe Blake and Elmer Lach), would be the Leafs' nemesis two years later when the two teams clashed in the 1947 finals. Ted "Teeder" Kennedy would score the game-winning goal late in game six to win the Leafs their first of three straight Cups — the first time any NHL team had accomplished that feat. With their Cup victory in 1948, the Leafs moved ahead of Montreal for the most Stanley Cups in league history. It would take the Canadiens 10 years to reclaim the record.

The 1950s: The Barilko Curse
The Leafs and Habs would meet once again in the finals in 1951, with all five games going to overtime. Tod Sloan scored with 42 seconds left in the third period of game five to send it to an extra period, and defenceman Bill Barilko, who had scored only six goals in the regular season, scored the game-winner to win Toronto their fourth Cup in five years. Barilko's glory, however, was short-lived: he disappeared in a plane crash near Timmins, Ontario barely four months after that historic moment. The Leafs would not win the Cup again that decade.

New owners, new dynasty in the 1960s
Before the 1961-62 season, Smythe sold nearly all of his shares in Maple Leaf Gardens to a partnership of his son Stafford Smythe, newspaper baron John Bassett and Toronto Marlboros president Harold Ballard. The sale price was $2.3 million--a handsome return on Conn Smythe's original investment 34 years earlier. Conn Smythe later claimed that he knew nothing about his son's partners, but it is very unlikely that he could have believed Stafford could have raised the money on his own.
And then, Toronto was able to reel off another three straight Stanley Cup victories from 1962 to 1964, with the help of Hall of Famers Frank Mahovlich, Red Kelly, Johnny Bower, Dave Keon, Andy Bathgate and Tim Horton, and under the leadership of coach and general manager Punch Imlach.
In 1967, the Leafs and Canadiens met in the Cup finals for the last time. Montreal was considered to be a heavy favourite as analysts said that the Leafs were just a bunch of has-beens. But Bob Pulford scored the double-overtime winner in game three, Jim Pappin got the series winner in game six, and Keon won the Conn Smythe Trophy as most valuable player of the playoffs as the Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup in six games. The Leafs have not won the Stanley Cup since.
In 1968, Mahovlich was traded to Detroit in a blockbuster trade. Then in 1969, following a first-round playoff loss to Boston, Smythe fired Imlach. Horton declared, "If this team doesn't want Imlach, I guess it doesn't want me." He was traded to the New York Rangers the next year.

1970s and 1980s: The Ballard years
Following Stafford Smythe's death, Harold Ballard bought his shares to take control of the team. Ballard's term as owner was marked by several disputes with prominent players, including Dave Keon, Lanny McDonald, and Darryl Sittler, poor win/loss records, and not a single Stanley Cup.
During the 1970s, with the overall level of talent in the league diluted by the addition of 12 new franchises and the birth of the rival World Hockey Association (WHA), the Leafs, led by a group of stars such as Sittler, McDonald, enforcer Dave "Tiger" Williams, Ian Turnbull, and Borje Salming (the first European to make a name for himself in the NHL) were able to ice competitive teams for several seasons. But they only once made it past the second round of the playoffs, besting the New York Islanders, a soon-to-be dynasty, in the 1978 quarter-finals, only to be swept by arch-rival Montreal in the semi-finals.
One of the few highlights from this era occurred on February 7, 1976, when Sittler scored six goals and four assists against the Bruins to establish a NHL single-game record that still stands more than 30 years later.
The serious decline started in July 1979, when Ballard brought back Imlach, a longtime friend, as general manager. Imlach traded McDonald to undermine his friend Sittler's influence on the team. Sittler himself was gone two years later, when the Leafs traded him to the Philadelphia Flyers. He left as the franchise's all-time leading scorer.
The McDonald trade sent the Leafs into a downward spiral. They finished five games under .500 and only made the playoffs due to the presence of the Quebec Nordiques, a refugee from the WHA, in the Adams Division. For the next 12 years, the Leafs were barely competitive, not posting another winning record until 1992-93. They missed the playoffs six times and only finished above fourth in their division once (in 1990, the only season where they even posted a .500 record). They made it beyond the first round of the playoffs twice (in 1986 and 1987, advancing to the division finals). The low point came in 1984-85, when they finished 32 games under .500, the second-worst record in franchise history (their .300 winning percentage was only 22 percentage points higher than the 1918-19 Arenas).
The Leafs' poor record did result in several high draft picks. Wendel Clark, the first overall pick in the 1985 draft, was the lone success from the entry drafts of this period and went on to captain the team.

Resurgence in the 1990s
Ballard died in 1990, and a year later his longtime friend, supermarket tycoon Steve Stavro, bought a majority stake in the Leafs from his estate. Unlike Ballard, Stavro hated the limelight and rarely interfered in the Leafs' hockey operations. Stavro's first act was to lure Calgary Flames GM Cliff Fletcher to Toronto after the 1991-92 season. Fletcher immediately set about building a club that would be competitive once again.
Fletcher made a series of trades and free agent acquisitions which turned the Leafs from an also-ran to a contender almost overnight, starting in 1992-93. Outstanding play from Doug Gilmour, Dave Andreychuk and Felix Potvin would lead the team to a franchise-record 99 points, third in the Norris Division and the eighth-best overall. The Leafs dispatched the Detroit Red Wings in the first round, then defeated the St. Louis Blues in the Division finals.
Hoping to meet long-time rival Montreal in the Cup Finals, the Leafs faced the Los Angeles Kings, led by the great Wayne Gretzky, in the Campbell Conference Finals. Since the Canadiens were playing for the Wales Conference title, this spurred hopes of a Leafs-Canadiens matchup in the Finals. The Leafs led the series 3-2, but dropped Game 6 in Los Angeles. Gretzky's hat trick in Game 7 finished the Leafs' run, and it was the Kings that moved on to the Cup Finals against the Canadiens.
The Leafs had another strong season in 1993-94, finishing with 98 points, good enough for fifth overall in the league--their highest finish in 16 years. However, despite finishing one point above Calgary, the Leafs were seeded third in the Western Conference (formerly the Campbell Conference) by virtue of the Flames' Pacific Division title. The Leafs would defeat the Chicago Blackhawks in six games and the San Jose Sharks in seven before losing to the Vancouver Canucks in five games in the Western Conference Finals. At that year's subsequent draft, the Leafs would package Clark in a trade with the Quebec Nordiques that netted them current captain Mats Sundin.

A new home
In 1996, Stavro took on Larry Tanenbaum, the co-founder of Toronto's new National Basketball Association (NBA) team, the Toronto Raptors, as a partner. Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd. was accordingly renamed Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE), and it remains the parent company of the Leafs, the Raptors, and Toronto FC of Major League Soccer (MLS), to the present day.
After two years out of the playoffs in the late 1990s, the Leafs acquired goaltender Curtis Joseph as a free agent from the Edmonton Oilers and made another charge during the 1999 playoffs after moving from Maple Leaf Gardens to the new Air Canada Centre, shared with the new Toronto Raptors. The Leafs eliminated the Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins in the first two rounds of the playoffs, but lost in five games to the Buffalo Sabres in the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Maple Leafs would reach the second round in both 2000 and 2001, losing both times to the New Jersey Devils, who would make the Stanley Cup Finals both seasons. The 2000 season was particularly notable because it marked the Leafs' first division title in 37 years, as well as the franchise's first-ever 100-point season. The season ended on a particular low, however, with the Leafs being held to just 6 shots in the final contest (game six) against the Devils.
In 2002, the Leafs dispatched the Islanders and their Ontario rivals, the Ottawa Senators, in the first two rounds, only to lose to the Cinderella-story Carolina Hurricanes in the Conference Finals. The 2002 season was particularly impressive in that the Leafs had many of their better players sidelined by injuries, but managed to make it to the conference finals due to the efforts of lesser-known players who were led mainly by Gary Roberts.
Joseph left to go to the defending champion Red Wings in the 2002 off-season; the team almost immediately found a replacement in veteran Ed Belfour, who came over from the Dallas Stars and had been a crucial part of their 1999 Stanley Cup run. Belfour could not help their playoff woes in the 2003 playoffs, however, as the team lost to Philadelphia in seven games in the first round. 2003 also witnessed a change in the ownership ranks, as Stavro sold his controlling interest in MLSE to the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and resigned his position as Chairman of the Board in favour of Tanenbaum. Stavro died in 2006.
The 2003-04 season started in an uncommon way for the team, as they held their training camp in Sweden, and playing in the NHL Challenge against teams from Sweden and Finland. That year, the Leafs posted a franchise-record 103 points. They also finished with the fourth-best record in the league – their best overall finish in 41 years. They also managed a .628 win percentage, their best in 43 years (and the third-best in franchise history). They defeated the Senators in the first round of the playoffs for the fourth time in five years, but lost to the Flyers in the second round in six games.

2006 to present
The Leafs struggled in 2005-06, and despite a late-season surge, led by third-string goaltender Jean-Sebastien Aubin, the Leafs were eliminated from playoff contention for the first time since 1998. This marked the first time that the team missed the playoffs under coach Pat Quinn, and as a result he was fired shortly after the season. Paul Maurice, an experienced NHL coach who had just coached the Leafs' American Hockey League affiliate, the Toronto Marlies, in their inaugural season, was announced as Pat Quinn's replacement. On June 30, 2006, the Maple Leafs bought out the contract of long-time fan favourite, Tie Domi. The team's current marketing slogan is "The Passion That Unites Us All." In addition to Domi, the Maple Leafs also decided against picking up the option year on the contract of goaltender Ed Belfour. Both players became free agents on July 1, 2006, effectively ending their tenures with the Toronto Maple Leafs. However, despite the coaching change and addition of new players such as Pavel Kubina and Michael Peca, the Leafs again did not make the playoffs in 2006-07.
On January 22, 2008, general manager John Ferguson Jr. was replaced by Cliff Fletcher on an interim basis.


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