What if Ballard had been bought out?
History of Leafs may have played out differently if Bassett had taken control in 1971
Our occasional series, Hindsight In 2020, digs into some of the most significant moves and moments in Toronto sports history: hirings and firings, trades and non-trades, things you knew a little bit about or didn’t know at all. This week, Leafs owners Harold Ballard and John Bassett Sr. go their separate ways ...
It was the spring of 1968 and the Toronto Maple Leafs, the defending Stanley Cup champions, had put on a late charge at the end of the regular season, winning five of their last six games. Except there would be no playoffs for these Leafs.
They had gone 2-13-1 in a stretch that had started in late January and would finish four points shy of the Chicago Black for fourth place in the NHL’s newly minted East Division, one that was comprised of the Original Six clubs in the first year of expansion.
The misstep came as a surprise to Leafs president Stafford Smythe and vice-president Harold Ballard. Their team had reached the playoffs nine straight seasons and won four of the last six Stanley Cups. So what to do with the tickets that had already been printed? The Leafs’ leadership, not one to waste money, decided to hold on to them.
In the spring of 1969, when fans picked up their tickets for Game 3 of the Leafs’ first-round series with Boston, the front of the tickets read: “Stanley Cup playoffs ’68.” Smythe and Ballard had saved themselves $1,250.
“Economy, I guess,” Ballard told The Star that year.
It was one example of how a devotion to dollars — in their bank accounts and sometimes in cookie jars that didn’t belong to them — contributed to a falling-out at the ownership level between media magnate John Bassett Sr. and the BallardSmythe tandem.
It also led to one of the franchise’s great “what if” moments when Bassett gave up his pursuit of sole majority ownership, selling his shares in the Leafs to Ballard and Smythe on Sept. 1, 1971.
“I’ve been trying for five months to gain control of the Gardens,” Bassett Sr. told the Star that day. “Finally, I realized that this operation is so much a part of Mr. Ballard and Mr. Smythe there is simply no way. So I told them to take me out.”
The three had been part of the so-called Silver Seven, captains of industry brought aboard by founder and majority owner Conn Smythe to modernize the franchise. Bassett, the chairman, Ballard and Stafford
Smythe bought the majority shares for $2 million on Nov. 23, 1961, just as the Leafs were about to embark on their last great decade.
But it was an uneasy partnership after the four Cups of the 1960s. Ballard and Smythe angered Bassett by firing head coach and general manager Punch Imlach, the architect of those championship teams, in 1969 and by selling the franchise’s farm teams in a cash grab that robbed the Leafs of its pipeline of talent.
Ballard and Smythe then became the subjects of a tax investigation. Bassett fired both from their roles in June 1969, but didn’t force them to sell their shares. The two staged a proxy war to regain control of the board in 1970, and won.
On June 18, 1971, however, Smythe and Ballard faced numerous charges of fraud and embezzlement. Bassett had seen enough and pulled the trigger on the partnership’s shotgun clause — a right of first refusal built into the original 1961 agreement.
“He wanted sole ownership. He wanted to get Ballard out of there. He and Ballard were not the best of friends,” said John Bassett IV.
“My grandfather thought Ballard and Smythe wouldn’t be able to come up with the cash, so he made them an offer to buy the team.
“But I guess (Conn) Smythe Sr. lent them the money so they could keep the team. They matched the offer. The shotgun clause went against him.”
Bassett sold his stake. Smythe, age 50, died six weeks later from a bleeding ulcer.
Ballard took full control of the team by 1972 and the Carlton Street Cashbox was born.
“All I’m interested in is making dough,” Ballard told reporters on a West Coast road trip in 1975. “A winning hockey team is secondary unless fans stop buying it, and I doubt if they ever will.”
But what if Ballard didn’t win that boardroom fight? What if John White Hughes Bassett had gained control of the Leafs instead of Ballard?
“Let me put it this way: Anybody would have been a better owner than Harold Ballard,” hockey historian Paul Patskou said. “They were winning Cups when Bassett was there. When Bassett left, they didn’t win any Cups.”
There is no shortage of “what if” moments for the Leafs, going back to Conn Smythe buying the Toronto St. Patricks to prevent them from moving to Philadelphia in 1927. There were misguided trades, bad draft choices, signings to regret, injuries at the wrong time.
But the most significant ones are branches from a tree rooted in Ballard decisions. Pal Hal was as cantankerous as he was lovable, as gentle as he was rough, and empowered to do what he wanted as majority owner.
“Sure I listen to (GM Jim) Gregory and (coach Red) Kelly, but the final decision is mine,” Ballard said on that 1975 trip.
“I think the problem was that Ballard thought he was a hockey genius,” retired Toronto Star hockey writer Frank Orr said, “and he wasn’t.”
Smythe, who had run the junior Toronto Marlboros and coached college teams, had some hockey chops; Ballard didn’t. Both showed a propensity for caring more about profits than wins.
They sold the Leafs’ farm clubs during the first wave of NHL expansion out of greed, instead of retaining control of young talent as trade bait as Sam Pollock and the Montreal Canadiens would do so successfully.
“Pollock had a huge number of players in the Canadiens’ chain that he was able to deal to expansion teams for draft picks,” Orr.
“Imlach would have loved to have done that, but he didn’t have the bodies because they’d sold it out from under him. They weren’t prepared for expansion.”
Imlach bears some responsibility, too, after picking petty fights with players over bonuses, contracts and the dawning of the NHL Players’ Association.
Pollock, meanwhile, built a team that won the Stanley Cup eight times from 1968 to 1979. Between 1967 and 1970, he included minor leaguers in deals to acquire 11 future first-round draft picks, some of them four years down the road. Montreal’s selections included Guy Lafleur and Steve Shutt. A secondround pick thrown into one deal turned into Larry Robinson.
The Leafs, in the same period, didn’t make a single trade for a future pick.
“Ballard was good at business,” Hall of Fame defenceman Bobby Baun said. “But after expansion, he didn’t keep up with the times.”
“I think they thought the Leafs would still get there every three or four years to the Cup,” Bassett IV said, “and it never happened again.”
Washing his hands of Ballard and Smythe, Bassett continued to build an empire that included the Toronto Telegram, a couple of TV stations (including CFTO) and the Toronto Argonauts. He had co-owned the CFL team since 1954, and bought it outright the same day he sold his shares of the Leafs in a $2.25-million transaction.
The Argos might have been a bigger deal than the Leafs back then. There were no Blue Jays. No Raptors. They were filling Varsity Stadium and then Exhibition Stadium every weekend — 45,000 strong at the Ex by the time Bassett sold them in 1974.
“Their games were an event,” Bassett IV said. “I remember the Double Blue club, 1,000 or 2,000 down for a brunch before the game.”
And Bassett spared no expense. He brought in colourful Leo Cahill to run the football program, and signed Joe Theismann as quarterback. The team, however, didn’t win a Grey Cup on his watch — famously losing in 1971 when Leon McQuay fumbled at the 11-yard line to give Calgary the win.
They weren’t always good, but they were never cheap. The Argos airlifted American stars regularly under Bassett, from Dick Shatto and Danny Nykoluk in the 1950s to the likes of Jim Stillwagon and Jim Corrigall in the 1970s.
“He let Cahill run it, brought in all those guys and put up the money,” Orr said. “If Bassett had run the Leafs the same way, and hired a GM like that ... They had the money (to pay for) stars. They could have kept the ones they had. He would have been the better owner. He knew what you needed.”
To buy Smythe’s shares, Ballard borrowed money from TD Bank, stretching himself and the team to the limit financially. And when the World Hockey Association came along in 1972, Ballard was either unable or unwilling to compete with the salaries.
Gone by 1974 were luminaries Dave Keon and Paul Henderson, future Stanley Cup champion goalie Bernie Parent and solid defencemen Rick Ley, Jim Dorey and Brad Selwood.
“They could have kept Bernie Parent for an extra $20,000 over a couple of years. Ballard wouldn’t do it,” Orr said.
“In the 1972-73 season, they were playing Atlanta and on the Leafs defence (were) Paul Henderson (and) Darryl Sittler — forwards on defence because they were stripped so thin.”
The Leads were good through the 1970s thanks to the efforts of GM Jim Gregory, who drafted well and mined Europe, but they were never good enough. They made eight playoff appearances under Gregory, never advancing beyond semifinals.
By the 1980s, the shelves were empty again. A rehired Imlach emptied them further, alienating star players and trading them for far less than their value: Lanny McDonald for Wilf Paiement. Sittler, with the C ripped from his jersey, was dealt for next to nothing. “It was a farce,” Orr said. Ballard’s legacy would include: Jail time for tax fraud. Embarrassing coach Roger Neilson by firing him and then rehiring him at the players’ behest. But Ballard wanted him to wear a paper bag over his head up until the national anthem, when he could take it off and reveal he was still around.
Putting white lettering on white sweaters when the league mandated names on jerseys, fearing the idea would hurt program sales.
Trying (and failing) to keep female reporters out of the Leafs’ dressing room.
“I liked him as a man,” Sittler said, “but, as time went on, it seemed like he became more the focus than the team. He liked to create headlines. He created unnecessary drama you didn’t need as a player, but that became part of the landscape for us.”
The Leafs’ record under Ballard: 569 wins, 738 losses, 207 ties and a .444 winning percentage (17th among the 22 teams that operated between the 197172 and1989-90 seasons, according to NHL.com).
And, of course, no Stanley Cups.
It’s clear Ballard and Bassett had it in for each other.
Ballard wanted to put a second CFL team in Toronto in 1973. It would have required unanimous approval from the four Eastern teams. Bassett rejected it.
Ballard tried to buy the Argos from Bassett in 1974. Bassett rejected the offer and sold to hotel magnate William R. Hodgson.
Ballard ultimately purchased the Hamilton Tiger-Cats — even winning the Grey Cup in 1989, largely by not interfering with football decisions. When Douglas Bassett, John Sr.’s son, tried to buy back the Argos, Ballard blocked him.
They were sold to brewery Carling O’Keefe.
Bassett Sr., meanwhile, continued to build Baton Broadcasting into an empire that would eventually become Bell Media, which co-owns Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. The Bassetts, however, are not involved.
If Bassett had controlled the Leafs, he might have handed the team to his sports-loving namesake son, who also didn’t mind spending money and taking risks.
John F. Bassett Jr., or John III, was part-owner of the WHA’s Toronto Toros and bargained with Ballard for rink time. He famously started the Toronto Northmen of the upstart World Football League — signing Miami Dolphins stars Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield — before the Canadian government, moving to protect the CFL, refused to allow the Northmen to play north of the border.
Bassett Jr. also owned the Tampa Bay Bandits of the USFL, creating a media organization perhaps ahead of its time. It looked a lot like the one formed by MLSE under the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, centralizing ownership of multiple teams and media outlets.
In an alternate universe where Bassett Sr. had succeeded in buying out Ballard, who knows what would have happened?
“Woulda, coulda, shoulda,” Bassett IV said. “You never know. But my grandfather would have taken a lot more pride and been a lot more professional about it.
“He was a better businessman. He had a passion for sports.”