In 1927, when Conn Smythe bought a hockey team that had gone by the name the Blueshirts, the Arenas and the St. Patricks, Toronto already had a team of Maple Leafs. In fact, they were champions: They’d just won baseball’s 1926 International League title. But Smythe had paid $160,000 for the hockey club and was determined to use the name. So just like that, the ball team’s nickname was jacked by a hockey man.
Smythe’s insistence was patriotic. During the First World War, Canadian soldiers—Smythe himself was a war hero—bore a maple leaf badge on their uniforms. In applying that to the renamed hockey club, Smythe later said he hoped the logo “would mean something to the team… they would wear it with honour and pride and courage, the way it had been worn by the soldiers of the Great War.”
Unveiled midway through the 1926–27 season with solid white sweaters bearing a green leaf, it wasn’t until the autumn of 1927 that the Maple Leafs first donned the blue-and-white colour scheme worn today. The 1927–28 campaign also saw Toronto begin alternating between white and blue uniforms depending on home and road games.
Franchise lore says the blue represents clear Canadian skies and the white signifies snow. A less poetic view holds that the two-colour palette simply fell in line with the city’s other major sports teams. The Toronto Argonauts (since 1873) and University of Toronto Varsity Blues (1877) made those tones the city standard. And the Blue Jays picked the same paintbrush in 1977.
Raising 13 Stanley Cups between 1932 and 1967, along with being an Original Six franchise, brought early fame to the Leafs uniform. Through the decades, the uniform Habs fans hate most (enough that the blue sweater was cast as the villain in The Hockey Sweater) has seen only minor alternations: patches added and removed; stripes thickened and thinned; the shade of blue deepened and lightened; the number of points and appearance of veins on the leaf fluctuating.
But it remained the Blue and White, along the way becoming an ingrained piece of Canadian culture. Even a francophone Philadelphia Flyers star concedes it beats the winged “P” he wears every game. “Toronto has the best logo,” says Claude Giroux. “It never gets old.” And it won’t, even after another 86 years.
