Goals, heartbreak and a fractured skull: The Toronto Maple Leafs’ greatest season was also their most remarkable
Before the days of Babcock or Quinn, of Sundin or Sittler, of Keon, Bower or Apps, there were the Toronto Maple Leafs of 1933-34 — the greatest Maple Leafs team of them all. They defended ably and scored at will. In seven different games, they rifled eight shots past rival goaltenders, and once netted nine against the New York Americans. Their 32-year-old captain and 38-year-old goalie were future Hall of Famers, as was the 24-year-old bull of a winger who led the league in goals and points.
On March 30, 1934, they were one win away from the Stanley Cup final.
The Leafs were in an unfamiliar place four nights earlier: down, two games to none, to the Detroit Red Wings in a best-of-five semifinal. Detroit had played the Leafs tough through the winter, once holding them to one point from three straight match-ups. But Toronto staved off elimination in Game 3, and then evened the series with a 5-1 victory.
“LAMBASTING LEAFS FORCE WEARY WINGS TO FOLD UP,” read the Toronto Daily Star’s front sports page the morning after Game 4. The Leafs had taken Detroit “by the neck and shook them over every inch of the torrid journey,” reported sports editor Lou Marsh. Game 5, it seemed, was theirs to lose.
A crowd of 14,500 watched the rubber match inside Detroit’s Olympia Stadium, the red-brick fortress where the Leafs had won the previous two games. The start was slow, and both offences ineffectual, until 14:35 of the first period, when Toronto’s top centre wedged his stick between an opponent’s skates and was escorted to the penalty box.
Half a minute into the power play, a Detroit defenceman named Ebbie Goodfellow was left alone by the Leafs crease, and made no mistake when a rebound fell at his feet. It was 1-0 Red Wings.
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On Jan. 1, the Red Wings will be the present-day Leafs’ opponent in the Centennial Classic, an outdoor game on the Toronto Exhibition grounds to mark the franchise’s 100th season in the NHL. It is a century that spans more than 2,800 wins, 65 playoff berths and 13 Stanley Cups.
Through all those years, 1933-34 stands out. Toronto scored 174 goals in 48 games that regular season, 54 more than anyone else, and finished atop the nine-team NHL. Hockey Reference’s Simple Rating System, a metric that melds goal differential and strength of schedule, considers them the strongest Leafs team ever — by far.
But these Leafs were not only good. Their season produced some of the most remarkable moments in hockey history, from a harrowing skull fracture and an overtime hat trick to an early all-star game and the most extravagant pre-game ceremony ever staged. And those moments were made all the more remarkable by the people involved — starting with the man at the top.
In 1927, a steely former University of Toronto hockey coach, Conn Smythe, leveraged his credentials as a sand and gravel businessman into the governorship of the Toronto St. Patricks, whom he soon renamed the Maple Leafs. “Through the decades that followed … those fortunate stalwarts Smythe selected to don his steel blades, to pull on his coveted jerseys of blue and white, became hockey exemplars, idolized by millions,” author Brian McFarlane wrote in the book Total Hockey.
Smythe’s coach was Dick Irvin, a retired forward who led a charge to the Stanley Cup in 1931-32, his first season behind the bench. Irvin’s captain was Hap Day, a defensive maestro who could move up to left wing in a pinch. And Day’s most celebrated teammate was King Clancy, a freewheeling blueliner who came to Toronto because of a horse race.
Clancy, an Ottawa native who starred for his hometown Senators through the 1920s, was the NHL’s most coveted player by September 1930. The Senators were in the throes of financial crisis, and made it known Clancy could be had for a price. Accordingly, Toronto’s board of directors offered $25,000 — but Smythe knew he’d need more.
Enter Rare Jewel, a two-year-old thoroughbred Smythe owned and planned to run in a stakes race at Woodbine Racetrack, despite the objections of his trainer and the filly’s winless career record. On his jockey’s advice, Smythe bet on the horse at 107-1 odds — and won well over $10,000 when she crossed the line first.
“Now,” he reportedly told two friends at the track, “I can buy King Clancy.”
At forward, the 1933-34 Leafs rolled out hockey’s most dangerous line: Joe Primeau, a smooth, defensively attentive playmaker at centre, between Charlie Conacher and Harvey “Busher” Jackson, two brash, defensively negligent snipers on the wings. Jackson, 22, could swerve with the puck on a dime; the 24-year-old Conacher, whose 32 goals and 52 points led the league that season, possessed a snapshot that once knocked New York Rangers goalie John Ross Roach out cold for five minutes.
Teamed with Primeau, 27, they formed the Kid Line. “(Primeau) would load the gun, and either Conacher or Jackson would shoot the bullets,” hockey historian Kevin Shea, author of The Toronto Maple Leaf Hockey Club: Official Centennial Publication, 1917-2017, said in an interview.
“They all just meshed.”
Two other players shone in the quirkiest games of 1933-34. George Hainsworth, a 38-year-old goalie traded to Toronto that October, kept the Senators at bay in a 4-1 win on Nov. 18 — a result Ottawa protested, unsuccessfully, on the grounds that the creases at Maple Leaf Gardens were too small. And on Jan. 16, the Leafs beat Ottawa 7-4 with three overtime goals, each of them scored by forward Ken Doraty. (At the time, overtime ran a full 10 minutes with unlimited scoring.)
In between, the season shifted seismically.
Behind Jackson on the depth chart, the Leafs had a left winger named Ace Bailey, a seven-year NHL veteran who, on Dec. 12 in Boston, had the misfortune of dropping back on defence to cover for a pinching Clancy — moments after Clancy dumped star Bruins defenceman Eddie Shore near the Toronto net. Shore made a beeline for the first Leaf he saw, and cracked him from behind.
“Bailey fell with a sickening thud, his head crashing against the ice,” the Daily Star reported. As he lay unconscious, Clancy’s defence partner, Red Horner, skated over and floored Shore with a single punch to the jaw. Bailey was driven by game’s end to a Boston hospital, bound for a neurosurgeon’s scalpel.
Smythe wasn’t happy. As he rushed from his owner’s perch to the Toronto dressing room, he instead started fighting a fan in the stands; he was arrested that night on assault and battery charges, having allegedly broken the man’s glasses and wounded his eye. Later, as the Leafs left the ice with a 4-1 win, they were pelted with game programs and other debris.
“Last night’s display of rowdyism … must go down on the books of professional hockey as one of the blackest marks of all time,” the Daily Star wrote the following day.
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Bailey did not hold grudges. He told McFarlane as much in 1990, long after Shore’s blow fractured his skull and prompted fears he would not survive the week. Bailey lived, saved by the handiwork of two Boston doctors, though he never played another game.
Shore was suspended for 16 games and missed his team’s next trip to Toronto, in which the Bruins wore helmets in case of retaliation. But he returned to Maple Leaf Gardens on Feb. 14.
To dissuade Bailey from suing Shore for damages, the NHL proposed an all-star game — the first of its kind — pitting the Leafs against the rest of the league. That included Shore, the reigning winner of the Hart Trophy. The benefit raised more than $30,000 for Bailey and produced an iconic photograph: the injured winger, in a suit and a fedora, shaking hands with his assailant from the bench.
“The game itself was just one joyful jamboree,” Marsh wrote in the Daily Star. “(The players) were on their good behaviour like the junior second-class in the red schoolhouse out at the crossroads when the school inspector is on his rounds … no sticking bullfrogs down Mary’s neck or sinking a pin in Johnnie’s fanny.”
Even without Bailey, Toronto continued to score and win in bunches, clinching the NHL’s Canadian Division with weeks to spare. Their final home game of the regular season was a formality — but a memorable one.
The Leafs played host to the Rangers on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, and used the occasion to celebrate their favourite Irish son: Clancy, who was wrapping up his best offensive season in years. Before puck drop, he was carried to centre ice on a throne — after several players rode out in parade-style floats, from a top hat to a boot to a boxing glove: decoys to fool the baying crowd.
Clancy wore a green jersey with a shamrock on the back to start the Leafs’ 3-2 win, though in doing so, he confused the Rangers and his suddenly pass-averse teammates in equal measure. After 20 minutes, he “went back into every day togs,” the Daily Star wrote, “and the night was saved for Ireland and Toronto.”
By March 19, the Leafs’ 26-13-9 record was set in stone, as was its semifinal with Detroit, the league’s second-best team. The playoff structure of the day called for the two division winners, Canadian and American, to immediately play for the “NHL championship,” despite the risk of crashing out before the real prize: the Stanley Cup.
Led by legendary coach Jack Adams, the Red Wings finished 1933-34 with 58 points, only three fewer than the Leafs. Still, Toronto may have expected to win in a waltz, at least judging by the apocalyptic tone Marsh took in print after Game 1.
“Oh Wirra! Wirra! And likewise ‘Oh, woe is me!’ — and to a lot of other folks this chill and frosty morning!” Marsh’s column began, mourning Toronto’s 2-1 overtime defeat. “The first game of the 1934 N.H.L. championship play-off is history, and the entry is so unexpectedly down on the debit side of the ledger that the boys and girls are well nigh speechless.”
It got worse after Game 2. Toronto lost 6-3 — and lost Clancy to hand and toe injuries. Jackson, held to one assist in two games, would be limited in Game 3 by a limp leg. And Smythe, the Daily Star reported, intended to rebuild his roster with younger players if the Leafs were swept.
But as the series moved to Detroit, the Leafs were not swept, nor were they beaten in four. Doraty scored twice in a 3-1 win, and the Kid Line combined for four goals two nights later — as Clancy, gamely gutting through his ailments, was knocked from the lineup for good on a check from Wings defenceman Doug Young.
Game 5 was scheduled for March 30, with three new Detroit forwards — the line of Gene Carrigan, Gus Marker and Ron Moffat — hastily recalled from the International Hockey League. Their job, whenever they vaulted the boards, was to stop the Leafs from scoring.
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The call for a tripping penalty, Marsh wrote at the time, was unjust. Yes, Primeau’s stick had caught the shifty feet of Detroit centre Cooney Weiland. But in the decisive Game 5, it paled in the context of “a dozen more serious infractions.”
No matter. When Primeau emerged from the penalty box at 15:03 of the first period, the Red Wings led 1-0 — an advantage they clung to as the night ticked by.
The goalscorer was Goodfellow, but the key was the play of the minor leaguers, who set the tone for Detroit’s suffocating neutral zone trap. The Leafs “fried themselves to a frazzle trying to run the Wings into the ground,” Marsh wrote. A stick or body inevitably nudged the puck away each time.
Wilf Cude, a 23-year-old goaltender from Barry, Wales, faced just 15 shots in the Wings net, though one almost beat him: Conacher from the sideboards on a rare open rush. And a 16th shot nearly tied the game, when Leafs centre Andy Blair moved to tap in a cross-crease pass — only to be wrapped in an unpenalized bear hug.
Toronto could have used Clancy’s leadership in Game 5, Marsh wrote the next day, or that of a healthy Bailey. Mostly, they could have used goals. Their season instead ended on the final horn, to the sight of Detroit fans spilling over the boards and hoisting the Red Wings on their shoulders.
The off-season of 1934 was turbulent and tragic. In April, the Chicago Black Hawks emerged from a playoff among the next four best teams and defeated Detroit for the Stanley Cup. By August, two of their players were dead: Vezina Trophy-winning goalie Charlie Gardiner, collapsed of a brain hemorrhage at age 29, and 24-year-old centre Jack Leswick, discovered in the Assiniboine River, his death ruled an accident or suicide.
The Ottawa Senators, four years removed from selling King Clancy, moved to St. Louis for one doomed season before folding. They were followed by the Montreal Maroons in 1938 and the New York Americans in 1942, as the NHL slimmed to its historic configuration: the Original Six.
From 1933-34 on, Dick Irvin’s Maple Leafs did not just lose in heartbreaking fashion. They ritualized the practice, falling in each of the next two Cup finals — and five of the next six. Irvin took his leave after the last of the bunch, to be replaced by his long-time defensive anchor and captain, Hap Day.
Irvin’s teams “were astonishingly good,” said Shea, the historian. “By the middle of that decade, there was disappointment because they hadn’t won multiple Stanley Cup championships. The guys were injured. Slowly, the better players trickled away and went to other teams.
“But in the early part of the ’30s, they were so dominant.”
Dominant, and also memorable.
In the years after his benefit game, Ace Bailey took after Smythe and coached the University of Toronto. He served as a timekeeper at Maple Leaf Gardens. And he harboured hope that the NHL would establish a permanent all-star contest, highlighting the sport’s top talent at the start of each season.
Eventually, the league did just that. The first official All-Star Game was held Oct. 13, 1947 — with King Clancy as referee. Maurice Richard, Milt Schmidt, Ted Lindsay and other luminaries lined up together on one side. Irvin, by then the coach of the Montreal Canadiens, manned the bench.
They faced the defending Stanley Cup champions: the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Email: nfaris@postmedia.com | Twitter: @nickmfaris