WHERE: Maple Leaf Square

WHEN: Monday, May 13

WHAT: Thousands of fans gathered outside the Air Canada Centre Monday night to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs take on the Boston Bruins in game seven of Toronto’s first NHL playoff series in nearly a decade. The Leafs led for most of the game, only to watch a 4–1 advantage melt away in the final minutes of the third period. Not long afterward, an overtime goal by the Bruins put an end to hockey season in Toronto. Click through the image gallery for a look at how the die-hards handled the elation and the crash.

Photo by bigdaddyhame, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Many of us have felt it coming for a few weeks, but now it’s finally official. After a game against the Ottawa Senators on Saturday, the Toronto Maple Leafs clinched their first playoff berth in nearly a decade.

It’s been a long, long time since this city has seen playoff hockey. Ours is the only team in the NHL not to have made it to the postseason since the 2004-2005 lockout.

Toronto fans have had a tough time these past several years. Single-player roster moves and staff or management changes were too often touted as silver bullets that would somehow lead the team to salvation. For instance, now-former general manager Brian Burke arrived in 2008 with much fanfare. The media considered him to be the saviour of the Maple Leafs (he was certainly, at any rate, being paid a saviour’s salary). Sure enough, Burke landed some big names in his first year as GM. It practically made us forget that he was inheriting arguably the worst NHL team in the league.

No reasonable person should have expected major success from the Maple Leafs in the first few years of Burke’s tenure. It takes time to build up an NHL team from worse-than-nothing to a perennial playoff contender. Even so, both fans and sports writers became increasingly impatient with the Leafs’ failures year after year. Then, before this year’s lockout ended, Burke was shown the door, leaving assistant GM Dave Nonis at the helm.

Though Nonis is officially the GM as the Leafs head to the playoffs, there should be no doubt that this is the team Brian Burke built. The Leafs are winning on the backs of the players that Burke went after, all playing in a style Burke had championed since game one—a style characterized by, to use Burke’s thesaurus-abusing phrase, plenty of “pugnacity, testosterone, truculence, and belligerence.”

Here’s how Burke, despite being fired for his efforts, managed to build a winning team.

Big, Mean, and Tough

It has been a popular assumption that any teams using the old rough-and-tumble approach won’t be able to keep up as the game gets faster and officials continue to tighten up on obstruction-type calls. What’s particularly fascinating about the success of the Toronto Maple Leafs this year is that it proves that the bellicose Burke model is a viable strategy in the NHL of today.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are the only team currently averaging more than one fight per game. Toronto is also the only team in the NHL with more than one player among the top ten hitters this season. One of those brawlers is Burke’s addition: Leo Komarov (signed from Moscow Dynamo of the KHL), who will likely end up with around 175 hits before the end of the season. Frazer McLaren, acquired from Anaheim by Nonis, will probably end up with something like 155 hits.

Burke’s Beauties Are Just That

Burke’s imprint on this Leafs team goes beyond toughness. The players he believed in and went after throughout his tenure as GM now not only lead the team in scoring, but are among the league leaders in points this year.

Burke’s trades for forwards Phil Kessel, Joffrey Lupul, and James van Riemsdyk have absolutely panned out. Though Lupul missed the majority of the season because of an injury, all three of these Burke acquisitions are making huge impacts on the scoreboard. In fact, Kessel is currently one of the top ten point producers in the league.

Dave Nonis Will Replace Brian Burke as General Manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs

The Leafs are even getting it done from the point. Cody Franson (acquired by Burke from Nashville in 2011) and Dion Phaneuf (from Calgary in 2010) are tied for fifth in the league for points by a defenceman, with 27 each.

And there’s no way we can leave Nazem Kadri out of this discussion. Burke selected Kadri 7th overall in the 2009 entry draft. Kadri was nowhere near ready for NHL action in his first few rookie years. Now, with nearly a point per game to his credit and one of the best plus-minus ratings on the team, there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s ready for prime time.

As a quick aside, only because people keep comparing Kessel and Tyler Seguin (who the Leafs could have had if Burke hadn’t traded first-round draft picks for Kessel in 2009): Four of Burke’s additions to the Leafs—Kessel, Kadri, van Riemsdyk, and Lupul—are putting up more points per game than Seguin this season.

Goaltending Is Working

Remember when every Toronto media outlet was talking about how the Leafs desperately needed an elite goaltender and should go after Roberto Luongo? Thank god that didn’t happen, right? The 60/40 workload split between James Reimer and Ben Scrivens, both Burke-era additions, has resulted in some solid goaltending numbers throughout the season.

Penalty Kill

Perhaps the yin to the pugilist yang for the Leafs is the team’s impressively effective penalty killing this season. It’s the third-most effective in the league, as a matter of fact. That’s a huge improvement over the past three seasons, during which the Leafs were always either at the bottom of the league or close to it.

While Toronto is actually in the middle of the pack in terms of how many times it has been shorthanded throughout the season, The Leafs’ penalty-kill effectiveness has been a major component of their success so far.

Why Brian Burke Was Good for the Maple Leafs

The Future

No matter what happens to the Toronto Maple Leafs in the postseason and the off-season, this year should be seen as a success. We should keep our expectations in check and remember that it takes time to build a successful hockey franchise.

For the first time in a long time, the Leafs have a rather healthy depth of talent. Regardless of how the playoffs unfold for the team, its managers would be wise to keep from messing with the first winning formula they’ve had in a long time.

Though we wouldn’t bet on the Leafs making the Stanley cup finals, maybe they’ll prove us wrong and give us even more to cheer about. Until then, we’re more than happy to celebrate the return of playoff hockey to Toronto.

CORRECTION: April 24, 2013, 1:40 PM This post originally said that Frazer McLaren was acquired for the Toronto Maple Leafs by former general manager Brian Burke. In fact, McLaren was added to the team by Burke’s replacement, Dave Nonis.

We look at concepts and products that, for better and worse, were developed in Toronto.

Toronto Maple Leafs centre Gus Bodnar being fitted by Sammy Taft, 1940s. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4382.

There are as many legends surrounding the origins of the phrase “hat trick” in hockey as there are goals that comprise one. One story traces the coinage to Guelph, where Biltmore Hats offered a head-topper to high-scoring players on its Mad Hatters junior squad. Another claims Montreal haberdashery Henri Henri offered a free hat to triple-goal scorers at the old Forum during the 1950s.

But the Hockey Hall of Fame recognizes Sammy Taft, a colourful Toronto hatter, as the originator of the hat trick. Regardless of the validity of his claim, he was an oversized personality, whom the Toronto Star once described as “the last of the crowd of Spadina chuchems and gonifs—wisenheimers and wheeler-dealers…ready to sacrifice almost anything for a one-liner.”

Growing up along Spadina Avenue, Taft discovered a gift for gab while working as a tie salesman. He was barely out of his teens when he opened a store, during the early days of the Great Depression. “One day this man walked in and he said ‘Why don’t you sell hats?’” he told the Star in a 1981 interview. “I told him I was desperate, I could sell anything but I didn’t have any money. The gimmick was, he’d give me a start and I’d either have hats in the store or his money’d be in the bank.” When the man returned a month later, all but two of the hats had sold. “Like Rodin with his clay,” the Star’s Susan Kastner wrote in a 1990 profile of Taft, “he would mold the unformed hatness to fit the essential you. You came in looking like a short, elderly golfer, you went out looking like Cab Calloway.”

Calloway himself was among the many entertainers whose photos lined the walls of the store at 303 Spadina Avenue. Taft posed with stars ranging from Duke Ellington to Bob Hope, as well as local bigwigs. The publicity worked well for the “World Famous Hatter.” Taft sold up to 10,000 hats annually during the 1940s.

Sammy Taft and Maple Leafs defenceman Bob Goldham, circa 1940s-1950s. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4400.

The legend goes that Chicago Black Hawks (that’s how the team’s name was spelled in those days) left winger Alex Kaleta wandered into Taft’s store while visiting Toronto in January 1946. A fedora caught his eye, but he didn’t have enough money to pay for it. Thinking of the promotional possibilities, Taft made an offer: if Kaleta scored three goals against the Maple Leafs that night, the hat was his. Kaleta went one better. Though the Black Hawks lost 6–5 to the home team on January 26, 1946, he scored all but one of Chicago’s goals. Taft claimed he heard Kaleta’s accomplishment referred to as a “hat trick” on the radio. (The term itself didn’t originate with shinny, though. From the 1850s, English cricket players received bowler hats for taking three wickets in three balls.)

Along with many of his fancy threads, Kaleta passed the hat to his youngest brother Arthur. Unfortunately, it disappeared during a move, around 1955. The family didn’t realize its significance until Hockey Night in Canada aired a segment about Kaleta’s hat trick a few years after he died in 1987. “I was shocked,” Arthur told Black Hawks historian Bob Verdi. “If I had kept that hat, I’d be a millionaire. Actually, if I had kept that hat, it would be in the Hockey Hall of Fame, where it belongs. But that was typical Alex. He was a terrific player but never put himself above anybody else and never said a word about the hat trick.”

Hockey players soon joined entertainers in Taft’s ads, and Taft himself eventually became one of Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard’s cronies. The hat business moved to Bathurst Street and Wilson Avenue in 1984, partly due to the changing identity of the old neighbourhood, and partly so an aging Taft could work closer to his Downsview home. Before his death in 1994, his tales about his colourful life formed the basis of a one-woman play called simply, Sammy Taft, World Famous Hatter.

Additional material from the January 3, 1994 and January 27, 1994 editions of the Globe and Mail, the March 21, 2009 edition of the Guelph Mercury, and the December 6, 1981, October 31, 1984, June 3, 1990, and January 3, 1994 editions of the Toronto Star.

We look at concepts and products that, for better and worse, were developed in Toronto.

Diagram of the original table hockey game, from Donald Munro's American patent, issued 1936. Image from Google Patents.

Like many people during the Great Depression, Toronto resident Donald Munro was unable to lavish his children with Christmas gifts. Not wanting to go without giving them something during the 1932 holiday season, he took various items from around his home—clothes pins, wire hangers, clock springs, and lumber—and patched together a toy. The result, as described in the introduction of the American patent he received four years later, was “a novel and amusing parlour game simulative of hockey, and calling for the exercise of skill and judgement on the part of the players in order to score against each other.” He had, of course, invented table hockey.

Noticing the enjoyment shared by everyone who played the game, Munro pondered its commercial possibilities. He convinced Eaton’s to take several games on consignment. Almost immediately, the retailer asked for more. Munro soon established a toy company to manufacture his game, so he could supply major retailers like Eaton’s and Simpson’s. Many sales came through department store catalogues, where, by the start of the ’40s, a game could be ordered for five dollars.

Early versions of Munro’s game were like a two-player pinball game, with wooden pins representing players. A slight hump in the middle sloped the playing surface, making it easier for the puck (originally a ball bearing) to move to either end of the “ice.” The game evolved, growing from four flippers to five and adding on-ice elements like bluelines and face-off circles.

The game was popular with troops during World War II. Munro’s son, Donald Jr., is said to have been called upon to repair games around military installations in Great Britain. Back home, Munro Toys expanded its product line to include games like crokinole, as well as a mechanical baseball game endorsed by Babe Ruth.

Present-day competitive table hockey. Photo by Corbin Smith/Torontoist.

By the mid-1950s, it was estimated that 75,000 Canadian homes owned a table hockey game. Competition from firms like Eagle Toys spurred refinements, like the replacement of wooden pegs with rods that allowed competitors to spin their players and move them up and down the ice. Deluxe editions added goal lights, period timers, representations of NHL teams, and more realistic boards.

In 1968, Munro Toys, by then based in Burlington, was sold to Buffalo-based aerospace firm Servotronics. “They knew a lot about science,” Donald Munro Jr. mused to the Globe and Mail in 1995, “but they didn’t know much about toys or hockey.” In May 1977, after the company defaulted on a loan, Munro Toys went into receivership. While the popularity of table hockey has dipped since the advent of video games, loyal players continue to conduct home games and participate in local competitions.

Additional material from the May 24, 1977 and December 2, 1995 editions of the Globe and Mail.

Following the opening of Lawrence Plaza in 1953, North York went shopping plaza mad. As the once-rural township transformed into postwar suburbia, farms gave way to large retail structures and their accompanying parking lots. From small neighbourhood strip malls to major shopping centres like Don Mills and Yorkdale, North York residents could do most of their shopping near home.

Among the participants in this boom was the oddly spelled Towne & Countrye Square. When it opened at the southwest corner of Yonge Street and Steeles Avenue in June 1966, it touted itself as “Sophisticated ‘Downtown’ Shopping in a Country Club Atmosphere.” Although one would be hard-pressed to find any resemblance between a genteel golf course and the shopping centre’s present-day incarnation as Centerpoint Mall, credit the opening day ad writers for their imagination. As was typical of the era, the mall was greeted with several advertorial pages in the community newspaper, the Enterprise.

Don your finest shopping clothes and step inside the photo gallery to experience the opening of Towne & Countrye Square.

Additional material from the June 1, 1966 edition of the Enterprise, the October 19, 1966 edition of the Globe and Mail, the December 9, 1999 edition of the New York Times, and the March 28, 1991 edition of the Toronto Star.

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

The Leafs are back in action, but will the fans keep turning up at the ACC in droves? Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdaddyhame/3293785939/"}bigdaddyhame{/a}, from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/pool/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

For Leafs fans, the NHL lockout was the latest in a series of indignities going back a generation. For some, the labour stoppage represented a breaking point, and while they may not be turning their backs on the Leafs completely, their passion for the team—and the sport as a whole—has cooled considerably.

According to Julian Sanchez, editor of popular Leafs blog Pension Plan Puppets, his readers and contributors are showing their discontent with both the team and the league in a number of ways.

“It’s funny because it covers the spectrum of protests. Some will just watch on TV when they probably would have gone to a handful of games,” he says. “Others won’t purchase any merchandise when they would have normally picked up something Leafs related.”

He adds that Leafs fans are “like smokers that can’t quit.” Most fans, he thinks, will continue to follow the team in spite of themselves. But many of them won’t pay attention to the rest of the league.

“They are still Leafs fans, but the unnecessary lockout, the owners’ dissembling about the reasons, and the script that the lockout seemed to follow just served to make them less [enthusiastic about] the NHL as a whole,” he says. “So they’ll watch Leafs games…but they won’t be as invested in the rest of the league.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by fellow blogger Michael Forbes, who runs the Bitter Leaf Fan Page blog.

“I’m pretty well done with NHL hockey,” he says. “It used to be that on Thursday night I’d be happy to watch the doubleheader and watch Detroit play Nashville. Coming out of the lockout, that’s just not going to happen.”

He adds that he’s surprised how well he’s gotten along without the NHL. Other sports have more than filled the void.

“I was always a soccer fan, but I got really into watching the Premier League during the lockout,” says Forbes. “And what’s interesting is, my kids will watch it. My kids won’t watch a hockey game, but we get up on Saturday morning and watch the game and talk about it.”

Mississauga high school teacher and lifelong Leafs fan Ryan Maitland says that, while he’ll cheer for the team, they won’t be getting any of his money this season. Maitland figures he usually spends roughly $400 a year going to an average of three games a season.

“Despite being tempted by my brother-in-law’s 12-game ticket pack, I am not going to see a game this year,” he says. “I had some idea of getting a new jersey this year, but I’m going to wait for the foreseeable future on that one, too.”

He adds that his boycott is a result of his frustration with the NHL owners, not the players.

“[The owners] had to spend half the season coming up with the new agreement,” he says. “I mean, I see why the players had to hold out—every offer from the owners got progressively better. But seriously, that was a stupid bargaining process. You could tell in September that it was going to happen, with the ridiculous first offer presented by the NHL.”

All that said, however, Maitland admits that his disgust with the owners is at least partially mixed up with a broader frustration with the Leafs’ performance, and that his will might weaken if the Leafs were to exceed expectations this year.

“Let’s just say my resolve would be tested if the Leafs suddenly burst out of the gates, destined to be playoff bound,” he said. “It would definitely make my choice more difficult.”

Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gardinergirl/4309903707/"}gardinergirl{/a}, from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/pool/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

In the wake of last week’s firing of Toronto Maple Leafs’ general manager Brian Burke, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on his four-year tenure in the post.

There are more than enough writers talking about why Burke was fired, and why the announcement came at such a critical moment (just ten days before the start of the season). The official press conference on Burke’s removal from office pretty clearly established that his firing had nothing to do with the performance of the Leafs.

Which makes sense, because whatever else may be true about Burke, and despite what some fans and sports reporters think, he did an excellent job.

Here’s why.

Worse Than Nothing

The 2008 Toronto Maple Leafs was easily the worst hockey team in recent memory.

There really wasn’t anything good about it. The team had no significant scoring talent to rally around, nothing remotely promising in the Toronto Marlies system, and next to no hopeful draft picks. The Leafs’ roster was bloated with players whose contracts included no-trade clauses, and two of the marginally valuable tradeworthy players—Carlo Colaiacovo and Alex Steen—were dealt to the St. Louis Blues less than a week before Brian Burke took the team’s reins. When Burke signed on as the Maple Leafs’ general manager halfway through the 2008-2009 season, the team he was inheriting wasn’t just bad, it was absolutely abysmal.

You can typically take any NHL team and sell off top performing assets for reasonable prospects, draft picks, or depth players. Take, for example, the worst performing team of the past decade: the 2006-07 Philadelphia Flyers. Of 164 possible points in a season, they managed only 56. Forget fifty-fifty: this team only won a quarter of its games that season. Even though the 06-07 Flyers was such a poor team, it still had plenty of assets to rebuild with. For example: trading Peter Forsberg landed it two promising prospects, a first-round pick, and a third-round pick from Nashville.

The 2008 Maple Leafs, however, could only manage a single second-round pick by trading away what was arguably their most valuable asset at that time: Nik Antropov. But it’s worth noting that the same day Burke traded Antropov for a second-rounder, he also managed to get another second-round pick for Dominic Moore, which is excellent value when you consider that Moore has never achieved stats to the level that he did for the Leafs in 08-09.

The rebuild had begun. Burke was selling off what assets the Leafs had as best as he could. The team was still terrible, and there was a long, long way to go. But at least it was getting better. In 2008, the Leafs had worse than nothing. By the end of 2009, they’d managed to bring themselves back to plain-old “nothing.”

Bigger Moves

In Burke’s first full season with the Leafs, his roster moves got bigger and bolder. Over the summer he wisely got rid of failed goaltending prospect Justin Pogge. He also acquired yet another second-round pick in exchange for two non-impact players.

In 2008, the Leafs were trying to survive on an inconsistent Vesa Toskala in the net, with a backup trio that included a well-past-his-prime Curtis Joseph, as well waiver-wire scraps from Ottawa in Martin Gerber, and also Pogge. Burke drastically improved the Leafs’ goaltending situation in 2009 by signing Jonas Gustavsson from Sweden, as well as upgrading from Vesa Toskala to Jean-Sébastien Giguère in a trade with Anaheim. The 09-10 season also saw Burke land a jackpot trade that brought premier defenceman Dion Phaneuf to Toronto in exchange for a grab-bag of spare parts.

And then, there was the Kessel trade. For some reason, Leafs fans and sports media love to rip Burke for this move. The Leafs gave up two years worth of first-round picks and a second-round pick for Phil Kessel. Yes, those two first-round picks ended up becoming Tyler Seguin (already an NHL All-Star) and Dougie Hamilton, who would have helped immensely. It’s easy to look back at this trade and say that Burke overpaid. At the time of the trade, however, the Leafs were getting a player that Burke believed to have All-Star potential for draft picks that could either have been boom or bust. And Kessel has performed as advertised. He’s been leading the Leafs in scoring while earning All-Star recognition in each of the last two seasons. Though in hindsight Burke did overpay, the trade was nowhere near as terrible as some make it out to have been.

Burke went after plenty of pugnacity through free-agent signings in 2009: Colton Orr and Jay Rosehill are shining examples. Arguably Burke’s worst move of the entire year was signing free agent Mike Komisarek. Komisarek’s contract was both too long and too expensive. While he provides some leadership as the Leafs alternate captain, he hasn’t made any kind of significant impact on the ice.

Into the Present

The team continued to improve in 2010. Burke acquired Joffrey Lupul, Jake Gardiner, and a fourth-round pick, all from Anaheim, in exchange for Francois Beauchemin. He also unloaded defensive deadweight Tomas Kaberle for a first-round pick from Boston. (Haters of Burke’s decision to take Kessel from Boston should love this one, as Kaberle has been pretty much dreadful for the Bruins.) In terms of free agents, the Leafs finally acquired some goaltending depth by signing Ben Scrivens and Jussi Rynnas, while James Reimer was emerging as another possible goalie talent. Clarke MacArthur, Colby Armstrong, and Michael Zigomanis were all excellent cost-for-value free agent signings in 2010 for the Leafs.

These moves have worked well for the Leafs. Kessel and Lupul are now the leading scorers on the team, while Phaneuf leads the team on scoring from the blue line. If recently acquired James van Riemsdyk adjusts well to a centre position between Kessel and Lupul, the Leafs will be looking even stronger this year than last. Without question, the current version of the Toronto Maple Leafs has promise. The team could be a fringe playoff contender for the first time in years. Granted, it still lacks a premier centreman, and while its goaltending prospects are very promising, they’re still largely unproven.

Toronto is still some distance from Stanley Cup contention, but the Leafs are a hell of a lot better than they were when Brian Burke first inherited the team. Had Burke not been so unceremoniously canned, it seems rather likely that Leafs fans would have started to see consecutive trips to the post-season for Toronto.

What can the Maple Leafs expect in the coming season? It’s still somewhat of a crap shoot. Burke’s replacement, Dave Nonis, is a Burke loyalist. It would be very surprising to see any kind of a roster shakeup. The Leafs’ best course of action would be to keep with the Burke plan—which notably includes staying away from trading for Roberto Luongo.

We’ll miss Burke’s truculence in press conferences almost as much as we’ll miss his excellent advocacy and charity work in Toronto over the past several years. (I mean, hell, we even selected Burke as a 2012 Hero for his efforts in promoting LGBTQ rights.) As for the Toronto Maple Leafs, we’re hoping that Burke’s vision for the team will come to fruition, even though Burke himself will have moved on.

Jacques Plante as depicted on the cover of The Jacques Plante Story.

Jacques Plante was not where he wanted to be during the 1970 Stanley Cup finals. During game one, the St. Louis Blues goaltender was knocked out cold after a shot from Boston Bruin Fred Stanfield shattered his face mask. The 41-year-old veteran netminder spent the next few days recovering from a concussion in a St. Louis hospital, where he was swarmed by reporters from Toronto. While curious about his condition, one question was on their minds: were the rumours true that “Jake the Snake” would become a Maple Leaf?

Surprised, Plante sat up in his bed and dismissed the story as silly. “It’s not that I don’t think highly of Toronto,” he told the press corps, “but you fellows know only too well the trouble I’ve had there with my asthma. The last thing that can happen to me is Toronto.” Speculation continued even though announcements from Leafs management indicated that, despite a last place finish during the 1969/’70 season, they were happy with the goaltending tandem of Bruce Gamble and Marv Edwards. Sportswriter Jim Proudfoot speculated in the Hockey News that Plante would fill in the role held by recently retired Johnny Bower of “the big stopper who’ll win the important matches, no matter what blunders are committed in front of him and who’ll make the impossible stops at times when it’ll interrupt opposition momentum and give his own colleagues a lift.” Proudfoot suspected that one or two excellent seasons from Plante would give the Leafs time for their young defensemen to develop and to find goaltending prospects for the future.

Source: Hockey Pictorial, February 1972.

Plante was released from the hospital in time to join the rest of the Blues for a post-season vacation in Miami Beach. While waiting for a bus to the airport at the end of the trip, Blues coach/general manager Scotty Bowman pulled Plante aside and told him the secret he kept since the trip began: Plante was heading to the Leafs as part of a three-team deal which earlier sent Tim Horton from Toronto to the New York Rangers. The Blues decided to protect their other, slightly younger goalies (Glenn Hall and Ernie Wakely) in the upcoming expansion draft which would admit Buffalo and Vancouver to the league. Plante reassuring Bowman that he would have made the same move, then thanked him for two wonderful seasons with the Blues since ending a three-year retirement from the NHL in 1968. Bowman later admitted letting Plante go was a big mistake.

After the trade was officially announced in late May 1970, Plante spent the off-season launching Fibrosport, a hockey equipment manufacturer specializing in goalie masks. Ever since he revolutionized hockey by donning his first face protector a decade earlier, Plante had continually refined his masks. To avoid a repeat of his recent hospitalization, he tested a mask which withstood the impact of a puck fired from an air cannon at 135 miles an hour. To avoid distraction during the upcoming season, Plante handed day-to-day production management to his 19-year-old son.

Team doctors were impressed when Plante reported to training camp in September 1970, finding his condition as good as rookies two decades younger. To prepare, he dropped his five-cigar-a-day smoking habit. Leafs executive Harold Ballard boasted that “in orthodox medicine, Plante’s health is expressed this way: 20-20 vision, age 41, 183 pounds, 140 over 80 blood pressure, and seven Vezina Trophies.” To alleviate Plante’s asthma, the team rented him an apartment on higher ground near Yonge Street and Highway 401 and arranged weekly tests at Sunnybrook Hospital. “I’ve never seen doctors anywhere else who seem so interested in finding what’s wrong,” he told the Globe and Mail.

Hockey cards of Jacques Plante from the 1971/'72 and 1972/'73 O-Pee-Chee sets.

As the season opener approached, Plante was confident about his skills. “I think I’m a better goalie now than before I retired in 1965,” he told the Hockey News. “In a couple of seasons watching hockey, I learned a great many things about goalkeeping and about the players I’d have to face—things I didn’t know before, I think that knowledge makes me better.” He made one concession to his age—“I need more time to get over a game than before. It takes a day of rest to get me back to normal.”

The team started 1970/’71 poorly, battling with the Buffalo Sabres for last place in the East Division. Play improved after Plante recovered from an injury, centre George Armstrong ended a brief retirement, and former Leaf star defenseman Bob Baun was reacquired from the Detroit Red Wings. Coach John McLellan gave Plante the freedom to choose which games to play and treated him like an assistant coach, giving him free reign to advise the team’s younger defenders. Qualities Plante was criticized for—being a know-it-all chatterbox—were embraced by the rebuilding Leafs. Players were impressed by the extensive notes he kept on opposing players and arenas. As Jim Proudfoot noted in the Star, Plante became the team’s “beloved patriarch,” who saved the team’s youth “from the jackpots their boyish mistakes bring on.” Reporters often used him for quotes, and commented on his frugal lifestyle and habit of knitting his own undershirts, which grew out of childhood poverty.

Plante soon embraced the city of Toronto. “I am still amazed at what a nice place Toronto is to live in,” he noted in his autobiography. “My view had been limited to hotel windows and unfriendly fans in the Gardens but, suddenly, I found both Toronto and its people altogether different. Maybe that’s been the trouble in our country; we just don’t get around and meet the neighbours in other provinces.

Cover, Hockey Pictorial, February 1972.

It’s hard to say what effect the supportive atmosphere had on his play, but as the season unfolded everyone realized they were witnessing an amazing performance. By the time he turned 42 in January 1971, Plante had a goals against average hovering under 2.00 and a pair of shutouts to his credit. In games he didn’t play in, the team had a losing record. A poll conducted by the Star of coaches around the league named Plante the top goalie. “If I had to win one particular game,” one coach noted, “Plante’s the guy I’d want to have going for me. It’s unbelievable, but he keeps getting better and better.” As the team rose in the standings, so did Plante’s volume of fan mail. He provided handwritten responses for up to 200 letters daily, though he saved time by providing a printed list of 15 key tips for aspiring players.

While his asthma was kept under control, Plante suffered a late-season injury whose true nature was covered up to prevent embarrassment. While lounging poolside during a roadtrip to Los Angeles, Plante suffered severe facial sunburn which prevented him from wearing his mask. The press was told he was rushed to hospital for “a badly infected face.” General manager Jim Gregory claimed the infection was caused by a botched dental cleaning. Plante drew on his legendary hypochondria when he told reporters that at first he thought he had a boil in his nose, then the mumps.

Source: the Toronto Star, April 16, 1971.

When the season ended, Plante recorded 24 wins, 11 losses, and four ties. In games he didn’t play or have a decision in, the Leafs managed 13 wins, 22 losses, and four ties. Plante also had four shutouts and a stunning goals against average of 1.88. How incredible his season was became clear years later, when hockey buff Edward Yuen tracked a statistic that wasn’t in use back in 1970/’71, save percentage. After piecing together every goalie’s performance, Yuen discovered Plante blocked 94.2 per cent of the shots he faced, giving him a .942 save percentage, which was over two percent better than the next netminder. Since the NHL began tracking the statistic in the early 1980s, the closest anyone has come to Plante’s figure is Brian Elliott, who reached .940 with the Blues in 2011/’12.

During the first round of the playoffs against the New York Rangers, Plante split goaltending duties with Bernie Parent, who reluctantly came to the Leafs in a blockbuster trade in January 1971. “Jacques Plante came over and grabbed my arm,” Parent remembered. “Cripes, Plante was like a god to me. I had been watching him on TV since I was a kid. Now I was on the same team with him. It was then that I knew even though I still felt the hurt over the Philadelphia trade, this trade was going to be the best thing that ever happened to me in hockey.” Plante’s mentoring helped Parent lead the Flyers to two Stanley Cups upon his return to Philadelphia a few seasons later. The veteran came to his student’s rescue after Parent’s mask was tossed into the stands by Vic Hadfield of the New York Rangers in a brawl during game two of the playoffs. Parent refused to play without it, leaving Plante to fill in for the remaining four minutes of the game. As the Star observed, “when a goalie loses his favourite face mask, it is handy to have the manufacturer occupying bench space in the same dressing room.” Plante made a quick call to Magog, where Fibrosport prepared a new mask for Parent in time for game three. Harold Ballard insisted that the Rangers pay the $150 bill for Parent’s new facewear.

Clip from Face Off. Jacques Plante appears at the 14-second mark.

Plante’s magic ran out in game six, when a Bob Nevin goal nine minutes into overtime eliminated the Leafs. Despite this, he was rewarded for his efforts through the season with a spot on the NHL’s second all-star team. He was among the Leafs who appeared in the movie Face Off, though he annoyed the filmmakers by stopping several shots from former Leaf Mike Walton when he was supposed to let one go by. Plante stayed with Toronto until he was traded to the Boston Bruins during their Stanley Cup drive in March 1973. After a stint as coach/general manager of the Quebec Nordiques, he returned to the ice for a season with the Edmonton Oilers before hanging up his skates at age 46 in 1975. He continued to mentor other goalies until his death from cancer in February 1986.

Additional material from The Hockey Compendium by Jeff Z. Klein and Karl-Eric Reif (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001), Jacques Plante: The Man Who Changed the Face of Hockey by Todd Denault (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009), The Jacques Plante Story by Andy O’Brien with Jacques Plante (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), and the following newspapers: the June 1970 and October 16, 1970 editions of the Hockey News, the September 10, 1970, December 5, 1970, and April 10, 1971 editions of the Globe and Mail, and the January 2, 1971. March 13, 1971, and March 26, 1971 editions of the Toronto Star.

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

The Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t what they used to be, and that’s not a great thing for local sports watchers. But the upshot of 45 years of hockey impotence is that fans have found ways of channelling their frustration. Occasionally it erupts in the form of a solid parody music video on YouTube.

Embedded above is a Leafs ballad set to the tune of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know.” It’s performed by Andrew Damelin, a finalist on The Score’s Drafted—which is sort of like Canada’s Next Top Model, except manly. The prize is a sportscaster contract with The Score.

So yes, this is a publicity stunt for Damelin, who is trying to amass online votes in order to advance to the next round of the contest. (He’s doing well so far.) Good on him for finding the one job interview where his willingness to get naked and cover himself with blue-and-white body paint is an asset.

The video should be safe for most workplaces.

Photo by {a href=:http://soundcloud.com/a-tribe-called-red/red-skin-girl-atcr-remix"}gardinergirl{/a}, from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

When Steve Stavro finally gained control of the Maple Leafs, following the death of Harold Ballard in 1990, his life had been an unequivocal success. After leaving Macedonia when he was seven, he followed in his father’s footsteps, opening a chain of grocery stores around the GTA. A noted philanthropist, he was instrumental in the soccer community, bred racehorses, and was about to become a member of the Order of Canada. But for Leafs fans, there was one abject failure on his resume that could only have been viewed as incongruously ominous: in 1962, Stavro’s grocery store, Knob Hill Farms, sponsored a hockey team in the Metro Junior A League. Following the season, both the team and the league folded.

Despite objections from Stavro, the Leafs hired Cliff Fletcher as general manager, a decision that would prove to be very wise. It didn’t take Fletcher long to make an impact, in part by working out a blockbuster 10-player deal with the Flames. It’s often said that the winner of any sports trade is the team that ends up with the best player, and Fletcher had secured just that in Doug Gilmour. In 1992-93, Gilmour set a franchise record with 127 points, and with help from the breakout goaltending of Felix Potvin and the late-season addition of Dave Andreychuk, he brought the team closer to the Stanley Cup than they have ever been since.

That season, following back-to-back seven-game series against the Red Wings and Blues, the Leafs squared off with the Kings in a conference final that will always be a thorn in the sides of Toronto fans. There were fireworks from the start, with infamous enforcer Marty McSorley delivering a nasty hit on Gilmour in game one, inciting all-out mayhem that culminated in Leafs coach Pat Burns attempting to climb across the bench to confront his Kings’ counterpart, Barry Melrose. With the Leafs leading the series three to two, a missed call in overtime—Wayne Gretzky drew blood on a high stick to Gilmour’s face—would prove to be costly when Gretzky scored the game-winner moments later. The Great One would go on to net a hat trick in the deciding game, during what he has since called the greatest game of his life. In 1996, Gretzky expressed a desire to defect to Toronto instead of his eventual landing spot in New York, but that deal would ultimately be vetoed by Stavro.

Photo by {a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/lalalouise/6288839085/}*lalalouise{/a} from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

From there, it was a slow descent into mediocrity. After losing again in the conference finals the following season—this time to the Canucks in only five games—the Leafs packaged a deal that shipped Wendel Clark to the Nordiques and got them Mats Sundin in return. This didn’t result in the expected immediate dividends, as they never won more than two games in a row in 1994-95. Also, an ugly 3-16-3 stretch in January and February of 1996 precipitated the firing of Pat Burns. The Leafs missed the playoffs for the first time in five years, and Fletcher traded Gilmour as one of his last orders of business before he himself left the team.

In 1996, Stavro entered into a partnership with Larry Tanenbaum, forming Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. The move to the Air Canada Centre in 1999 ushered in the era of head coach Pat Quinn, which was characterized by impressive regular seasons and perennial playoff underachieving. Under Quinn, with Curtis Joseph between the pipes, Sundin lighting up the scoreboard and Tie Domi dishing out vigilante justice, the franchise garnered its first ever 100-point season in 2000 and made the playoffs for six straight years. The end result was two conference finals lost and a deep, abiding hatred of frequent playoff ousters the New Jersey Devils and their frustratingly effective clutch-and-grab style. In 2003, Steve Stavro stepped down as chairman of MLSE in favor of Tanenbaum, receiving as a parting gift his own luxury box that displaced some disabled children. Hockey went dark in 2004 with a lockout, and if Toronto knew what was in store for them over the course of the next seven years, they may not have wanted it to return.

Pat Quinn remained in 2005, but even a respectable 90-point season wasn’t enough to qualify the team for the playoffs or to enable him to keep his job. With an aging Sundin and an unproven supporting cast under new coach Paul Maurice, the Leafs failed to crack the post-season for two more years despite a guarantee from Maurice to accomplish just that in 2007. As expected, he was promptly fired, just like his porous goalie Andrew Raycroft and many others. Fans bid a less welcome goodbye to the soon-to-be retiring Sundin, another deserving athlete robbed of his chance at a championship win.

On paper, the tandem of general manager Brian Burke and coach Ron Wilson appeared to be a swell idea. Burke blew into town full of bluster, speaking of truculence and then demonstrating his intentions by challenging other GMs to fights in barns. And yet, the product he put on the ice in 2009, his first full season, finished dead last in the conference. The acquisitions of defenseman Dion Phaneuf and forward Phil Kessel have proven to be worthwhile, but one wonders if the cost may have been too steep. Signs of incremental improvement in 2011 did not carry over to this past season, leading to a mob mentality that forced Burke’s hand in dismissing Wilson.

And now, here we are, not a taste of the playoffs since 2004, wondering once again how to right the ship. Ask any fan in the city and they will have a detailed plan for success—sturdier defense, a veteran goalie, speedy Europeans, or bruising fighters that will teach opponents a lesson. Toronto is teeming with folks that are, above all else, tired of losing. They are demanding not the apologies that they have been given, but only an immediate honest-to-goodness winner. If that seems unreasonable or irrational, such is the nature of these things. Fair or unfair, rabid fan-bases don’t much care how you do it, just that it gets done.

Excerpt, the Globe and Mail, May 3, 1967.

Forty-five years ago today, the Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup, defeating the Montreal Canadiens in a six-game series. Few could have imagined that nearly half a century later, fans would still be waiting to see the team hoist the trophy again.

Over the next two days Torontoist will look at the good and bad moves the team has made since 1967, without resorting to cries like “Leafs suck!”

Until his death in April 1990, many of the franchise’s faults could be blamed on one man: Harold Edwin Ballard. From the time he entered the Leafs’ ownership as part of a triumvirate with John Bassett and Stafford Smythe in 1961, Ballard seemed driven less by a love of the game and more by greed and a near-pathological need for attention. The same year the Leafs won their last cup, that greed appeared to drive the decision to sell their top farm teams in Rochester, NY and Victoria, BC for just under $1 million. The move robbed the Leafs of 45 players, many of NHL calibre. The combination of the sale, the expansion draft to stock six new teams in 1967, changes to player development rules that denied the team the use of the junior Marlboros as a feeder team, and aging stars thinned the Leafs’ depth pool, which led to a last place finish during the 1969/70 season.

Following Bassett’s decision to sell and Smythe’s death in 1971, it quickly became clear that Ballard, not the players, intended to be the Leafs’ star attraction. A year-long stint in prison for defrauding the Leafs and Maple Leaf Gardens provided a temporary break, during which the Leafs became the second NHL team to dip into the emerging European talent pool. Unfortunately, the experiment ended after the signings of Inge Hammarstrom and Borje Salming due to Ballard’s seeming xenophobia, which caused future European stars to sign elsewhere.

Darryl Sittler and Rosemarie for March of Dimes Put Yourself in the Picture campaign, Maple Leaf Gardens, 1970s. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4256.

Despite the team’s slow but steady improvement during the mid-1970s with young talent like Salming, Darryl Sittler, and Lanny McDonald, the omnipresent Ballard (who lived in an apartment in the Gardens by this point) loved denouncing players after bad nights. He was especially annoying during playoff runs—when Ballard boasted that the Leafs would defeat defending Stanley Cup champions the Philadelphia Flyers during the first round of the 1976 playoffs, ratcheting up the pressure on players considerably. Coach Red Kelly tried to distract the team by latching onto the “pyramid power” fad (basic idea: if you placed pyramids around a room, it was felt they would have supernatural powers). Kelly’s amateur psychology seemed to work when Sittler scored five goals in one game, but the Leafs lost the series in seven games.

When Roger Neilson replaced Kelly in 1977, Ballard faced a new problem: a coach who preferred improving the team over hanging out with the owner. Players raved about Neilson’s unconventional coaching methods, while the media dubbed him “Captain Video” for his use of videotape to analyze the team’s performance. An envious Ballard devised unsuccessful attempts to embarrass Neilson, such as distracting his video review sessions on the road by sending a prostitute to his hotel room. Despite taking the team to the semi-finals during the 1978 playoffs, Ballard was eager to dispose of Neilson. The situation devolved into farce when, after retracting a March 1979 firing attempt when he couldn’t secure a replacement, Ballard tried to convince Neilson to approach the bench with a paper bag over his head. Neilson refused to go along.

Left: 1959/60 Parkhurst hockey card of Punch Imlach. Right: 1974/75 O-Pee-Chee hockey card of Lanny McDonald, sans trademark moustache.

After finally firing Neilson and general manager Jim Gregory following the 1978/79 season, Ballard initially considered Don Cherry and Scotty Bowman as their respective replacements. Instead, he rehired Punch Imlach, who had guided the Leafs to their last Stanley Cup. It was one of the most catastrophic moves in franchise history. Imlach was an old-school disciplinarian who expected his orders to be followed without question. His hard-nosed approach destroyed a team that had developed cohesiveness, leadership, and pride. Most of his wrath was directed at captain Darryl Sittler, initially for defying his request not to participate in a Hockey Night in Canada intermission skills competition program. The team failed to receive a court injunction to block Sittler’s appearance, despite contracts that obligated the team to participate in the program. Relations deteriorated between Imlach and Sittler, who was backed by his teammates. Out of spite, and because Sittler had a no-trade clause in his contract, Imlach unloaded the captain’s closest friends on the team. A series of bad trades ensued, the worst sending Lanny McDonald and Joel Quenneville to the Colorado Rockies in December 1979. A demoralized Sittler had the “C” removed from his sweater. The only swap that worked in the Leafs’ favour saw fan-favourite enforcer Tiger Williams sent to the Vancouver Canucks for goal scorers Bill Derlago and Rick Vaive.

The 1980s marked the dark ages for the franchise. Following Imlach’s dismissal after a heart attack in 1981 (the second he had suffered during his tenure), Gerry McNamara led the team to six losing seasons. A veteran scout before becoming GM, McNamara seemed as interested in battling the media as building a competitive team. When McNamara attempted to prove he had suffered brain damage following a car accident, the jokes flowed. McNamara had to work within Ballard’s increasing stinginess with funds, which resulted in the Leafs having only three full-time scouts, rarely pursuing free agents or participating in the waiver draft, and filling key roles with people already in the organization. Prospects were often rushed to the NHL far sooner than they should have been, though promising players like Wendel Clark, Russ Courtnall, Vincent Damphousse, Al Iafrate, and Gary Nylund emerged.

Harold Ballard with Miss Tiger Cat and Miss Blue Bomber, 1960s. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 2409.

By the end of the 1980s, Ballard’s declining health muddied personnel matters. After an interregnum, 30-year old Gord Stellick was hired as McNamara’s replacement in 1988. He made one colossally bad trade (Courtnall for John Kordic), found himself saddled with a coach forced into the position by Ballard (George Armstrong), and was left virtually powerless during the next amateur draft. As sportswriter William Houston observed, “Everything seemed out of control. At the top was a feeble and ailing owner, who refused to give his general manager any real control. The coach didn’t want to coach. And many of the players didn’t seem to want to play.” The situation was such that Maple Leaf Gardens’ stock rose whenever Ballard entered the hospital. According to one investor, “We know he had diabetes. We know he doesn’t follow his diet. We know he’s eighty-three. That’s why I started buying stock.”

But the last season of the decade showed signs of hope. After Stellick resigned, new GM Floyd Smith and coach Doug Carpenter guided the 1989/90 Leafs to the team’s first .500 season since 1978/79. It helped that Ballard had grown too infirm to meddle. Wendel Clark delivered one of the best lines following Ballard’s death on April 11, 1990: “I wish him well—wherever he goes.”

Things were looking up for the 1990s.

Additional material from Leafs AbomiNation by Dave Feschuk and Michael Grange (Toronto: Random House, 2009), Maple Leaf Blues by William Houston (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), and Why The Leafs Suck And How They Can Be Fixed by Al Strachan (Toronto: Collins, 2009).

Beer and hockey. Aside from maybe the beaver and the maple leaf, there are probably no two things more emblematic of our great country. And when those two elements are combined, you get a quintessentially Canadian event known as the Copper Kettle Cup. Now in its ninth year, the annual tournament brings together six local breweries in an effort to determine not only whose employees are best at hockey, but also whose are able to drink the most of their companies’ products. For Steamwhistle employee and tournament organizer Ben Taylor, the mission statement is fairly simple.

“We get together, sweat and drool on each other, bleed on each other, and drink each other’s beer,” he said. Participating in either his fifth or sixth Kettle Cup, Taylor’s uncertainty in the matter seemed to underscore his team’s shortcoming in previous years. “Our weakness is always getting too drunk,” he admitted. Wellington has traditionally dominated on the ice. Their team name is etched on the hardware six times, while Steamwhistle has yet to claim the prize.

As they boarded their company bus shortly before 9 a.m. on Saturday, the motley crew from Steamwhistle was determined to change all of that this year. As cans of liquid breakfast were passed around and the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” blared over the speakers, the trek to Chesswood Arena kicked off in a rollicking fashion. The brewery’s team members—many of them sporting intimidatingly scuzzy mustaches—spanned various age groups and skill levels. The majority were in their twenties and thirties, but the team also had the tournament’s most senior player, defenseman Paul Ruttan, whose age, according to him, was “old as shit.”

The players continued to rib each other as they entered the arena’s rank dressing rooms, where the stench of man-sweat mingled with various other offensive bodily odors. Some players had distinctive nicknames—like Chris “Doctor” Johnston—while some monickers were a little more unfortunate. (Brian “Cinnamon” Rodrigues.) Steamwhistle’s president, Cam Heaps, swilled beers with the gang and delivered on what apparently had been a team obsession with procuring a masseuse to help deal with afternoon muscle tightness.

The underdogs from Steamwhistle opened the tournament on what must have felt like a familiar note. They allowed a goal in the first fifteen seconds, on the way to a disappointing 4-1 loss to Mill Street. Steamwhistle narrowly avoided a shut-out thanks to a late rally on an impressive end-to-end rush by the team’s “ringer”—Torontoist’s own photographer, Corbin Smith.

Expectations were low for the second match, but perennial heavyweights Wellington faltered defensively, allowing Steamwhistle to claim victory, 11-8. That set the stage for a do-or-die match-up with Amsterdam that would end up determining who would move on to the finals.

The game lived up to Taylor’s assertion (and implicit Maple Leafs jab) that we would be witnessing “the most meaningful, high-stakes hockey that the city is going to see.” In front of a crowd that was overwhelmingly stacked with Steamwhistle supporters, a back-and-forth battle ensued that, at times, bordered on intense and downright hostile. Buoyed by the cheers of their friends and the tournament’s only mascot, a giant bottle of beer named Steamy, it appeared that an upset was in the making. Unfortunately, despite a mad scramble in front of the net in the waning seconds, the Steamwhistle crew could not clinch a tying goal. Amsterdam prevailed, 5-4.

The Steamwhistle players didn’t seem fazed. After all, they had to focus on hosting the after-party back at their brewery. Typically, the winners of the previous year’s tournament handle the celebration, but as this is nearly always Wellington (this year was no exception), it was decided that Steamwhistle would take the reins.

There was plenty of food on hand to accompany the assortment of beer from the participating breweries, and music by Free Beer, a deejay who looked curiously like the man inside the Steamy mascot suit. It was a fitting end to a day that was less about the actual competition than, as Taylor explained, “the spirit of camaraderie.”