We asked the 1967 Maple Leafs legends to give the current team some advice. Eread excerpt on
Reporters Joseph Hall and Paul Hunter spoke with 15 of the 18 surviving players who were part of the Maple Leafs’ last Stanley Cup victory. The players, part of a popular feature published last year, were recently contacted again to get their impressions of this year’s playoffbound team. We also talked to several current Leafs about their thoughts on the club’s storied history. The torch glows dimly now, flickering and fading with the passage of time. It’s an honour that Ron Ellis has carried with pride, but says he’s kept too long. He’s eager to pass it on.
And the current crop of Toronto Maple Leafs — all born more than a decade after Ellis and his teammates won this city’s last Stanley Cup — are just as eager to take it up after 45 years of franchise futility.
As the team — flat-out woeful for much of that 41⁄ 2- decade stretch — enters the playoffs for the first time in nine years, it can be hard to even imagine that winning was once habitual for Hogtown’s hockey team. But the 1967 Cup was the fourth for the team in just six seasons, and gave the Leafs 13 in total. That tied them with the Montreal Canadiens, a haul Toronto’s hated rival has since upped to an NHL-leading 23 since 1917.
“When I get introduced at an event or something, it’s as a member of the last Stanley Cup team,” says Ellis, a young and elegant winger on that ’67 squad. “I don’t need that anymore. It’s time to pass the baton on to a new Stanley Cup team here in Toronto.”
Ellis, now 68, hung up the skates on his 16-year NHL career a decade before Nazem Kadri was born in October 1990. So the current Leafs sniper feels no sense of shame for his team’s post-centennial failures.
“It’s not like it’s our fault, and I don’t think it’s something you can worry too much about,” says Kadri.
In contrast to today’s youthful squad, the ’67 crew was an over-thehill gang, with 10 players on the wrong side of 30. Most of them had been part of a three-Cup run earlier in the decade but it was a team given little chance to scrape out another. The decaying Leafs finished third that season, 19 points behind the Chicago Blackhawks, the league’s regular season champs.
It was anticipated that those Hawks would easily flick Toronto aside in the first round. But it was the Leafs who took out Chicago in six games and then, in the Stanley Cup final, treated Montreal to the same fate.
It was one last magical and unexpected hurrah.
The emphasis would, as the decades passed, come to be on the last rather than the hurrah. And while Kadri and Co. don’t see the post-’67 drought as a historical burden, they do hope to end it soon. “Obviously we understand that a championship hasn’t come to Toronto hockey in quite some time,” he says. “We’re always looking to change that, to win another Cup for Toronto.” Until then, that ’67 glory will continue to cast shadows of shame and squandered heritage over a town that is, arguably, the most fervent hockey centre on earth. Kadri and his teammates are two generations removed from a time when that rabid market was rewarded with Stanley Cup championships with some regularity. The banners marking those wins be- hind the south net at the Leafs’ Mastercard practice facility in Etobicoke hang like accusations over the players scrimmaging below. They run, left to right, in a metronomic stanza of success: 1918, 1922, 1932, 1942, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1967.
And then they end.
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