AUTHOR’S NOTE

The history of the Toronto Maple Leafs doesn’t start with the Leafs.

When Toronto entered the NHL in 1917, the team was operated by the Toronto Arena Company and known simply as the Toronto Arenas, but often called the Blueshirts as well. A couple of years later, under a change in ownership, the Arenas were renamed the St. Patricks. For the next eight years, the St. Pats sported green uniforms, a nod to their Irish label.

In the midde of the 1926–27 season, Conn Smythe purchased the St. Patricks and rechristened them as the Maple Leafs. The following season they switched up their colour scheme and have been blue and white ever since.

There are stories in this book about the Arenas, St. Patricks, and Leafs, oh my, but they are all the same franchise. I’ve also referred to the team as the blue and white, but only in the Leafs era, though they did wear blue as the Arenas. And, of course, you may also know them as the Buds because, well, buds turn into Leafs. One of my favourite Twitter follows, Platinum Seat Ghosts, popularized the expression “the Buds are all day,” so hopefully they appreciate that now, the Buds are all book.

Notice I did not call them the Laughs because that is simply not funny — and you should dissociate yourself from anyone in your orbit who uses that term with a straight face. Finally, I poured my heart into researching this book. And while I have double- and triple-checked my work, mistakes happen — but any errors are mine and mine alone. One thing I did want to note is that our understanding of history is always changing. Take, for an example, a story I included about Larry Murphy. On March 27, 1996, he scored his 1,000th career point, becoming the fourth defenceman to accomplish the feat. All the newspaper coverage the next day focused on that milestone, and if you watch the clip on YouTube, you will see his teammates mob him in celebration after he notches the landmark point.

But if you were to go to the NHL’s website and look up Murphy’s stats, it appears he actually hit the 1,000-point mark two days earlier. As researchers have reviewed game sheets over the years, particularly when the league underwent a major digitization project in the lead-up to its centenary in 2017, our prior knowledge has been challenged by new information. While this means Murphy technically hit his milestone on March 25, it doesn’t change the fact that for him and his teammates, he made history two nights later on the road in Vancouver. The numbers may have changed, but you cannot substitute the emotion. So, with that in mind, I kept my Larry Murphy story the way it was, because that particular moment in time was when he wrote his name into the record books.