If you look at the top ten that we came up with, we could make a case for any one of them as the best Toronto Maple Leaf of all time. Not only that, when you have a team with a long history and fervent fanbase of Toronto, you will likely find a list that has one of those men at the top. After what felt like weeks of analysis, we settled on Syl Apps as the greatest Maple Leaf ever.
Apps was an outstanding athlete who won the Gold Medal at the 1934 British Empire Games and would later be sixth at the 1936 Olympics. The multi-sport athlete was courted by the Toronto Maple Leafs to play, and he made immediate history as the first-ever Calder Trophy winner as the NHL's best rookie.
As a rookie, Apps led the NHL in Assists and did so again in his second NHL season. While the Center never won the Hart, from 1938-39 to 1942-43, he was either second or third in the balloting for the most coveted individual trophy in hockey. Apps also led Toronto to a Stanley Cup win in 1942.
Apps missed two seasons as he joined the Canadian Military for World War II, and the Center came back, still an elite player, where he led the Leafs to Stanley Cups in 1947 and 1948. The ’48 Cup win would be his final game in the NHL, ending a ten-year run all with Toronto.
Amazingly, he only had 56 Penalty Minutes over his career, and as such, Apps won the Lady Byng in 1942, was the runner-up for it twice, and the second runner-up another two times. While we again concede that there were others who could easily slide in at the top here, can anyone state emphatically that Apps shouldn't be number one? Not emphatically. Not a chance.
And, yes, we think we would have written those last three sentences had we gone with one of the others we considered for number one. This is how tight it was.
Apps entered the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961, and his name was one of the first honored in the Air Canada Center in 1993. In 2016, his number 10 (which George Armstrong also had) was officially retired by the Leafs.
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