1967 Maple Leafs overcame coach, Black Hawks to reach Cup Final

Editor’s Note: The NHL Alumni Association will pay tribute to the 1967 Stanley Cup champion Toronto Maple Leafs on Feb. 1, as part of NHL All-Star Thursday at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.

The NHLAA’s “Keith Magnuson Man of the Year” award will salute the seven living members of the Maple Leafs’ most recent championship. Expected to attend are Hall of Famers Dave Keon, Frank Mahovlich and Bob Pulford, and fellow forwards Brian Conacher, Ron Ellis, Pete Stemkowski and Mike Walton.

The award is presented to a former player or players who have applied the intangibles of perseverance, commitment and teamwork developed through the game into a successful post-career transition. Honorees are ambassadors for the game at all levels through their continued commitment in community and charitable causes. This award is named in honor and memory of Keith Magnuson, Executive Board of Director of the NHL Alumni Association who died Dec. 15, 2003.

To mark the occasion, NHL.com recently interviewed the seven living members whose names are on the Stanley Cup for a two-part look at the 1966-67 Maple Leafs. In Part 1 today, the rocky, uneven road to a Stanley Cup Playoff berth against the top-seeded Chicago Black Hawks and a huge Semifinal upset win. On In Part 2 on Thursday, Toronto stuns the Montreal Canadiens in the Final, and the aftermath of a championship for the ages.

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TORONTO -- The 1967 Stanley Cup parade had been planned in Montreal, a virtually guaranteed third consecutive celebration from the historic Forum to City Hall for the conquering Canadiens.

A showcase was set prominently in the Quebec pavilion of Expo 67, the trophy bound to be a popular sterling attraction at the city’s World’s Fair that summer.

But the Toronto Maple Leafs had other plans for Canada’s 1967 centennial year, shoving a heavy flat-bladed stick into the spokes of expectation of not just one team, but two.

The 1967 Stanley Cup presentation is made by NHL President Clarence Campbell shortly after Toronto Maple Leafs captain George Armstrong’s empty-net goal to clinch Game 6 against the Montreal Canadiens on May 2, 1967.

Against long odds, Toronto stunned the Chicago Black Hawks, then the Canadiens, in two dramatic six-game series to win the last championship of the NHL’s “Original Six” era -- the six-team, 25-year period from 1942-67 that ended when expansion doubled the League to 12 teams for the 1967-68 season.

A Stanley Cup parade was held May 5, 1967, not in downtown Montreal but from Maple Leaf Gardens to Toronto City Hall; the trophy was indeed displayed at Expo 67, but in the Ontario pavilion, a few rink lengths from Quebec’s.

“You’ve got Expo, let us have the Stanley Cup,” Maple Leafs forward Jim Pappin crowed to Montreal reporters May 2, 1967, having scored the winning goal in his team’s 3-1 home-ice Game 6 victory.

The 1967 Maple Leafs will be celebrated Thursday at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on the opening night of 2024 NHL All-Star Weekend, the NHL Alumni Association honoring the seven surviving members of that championship team with its 22nd Keith Magnuson Man of the Year Award.

The 1966-67 Toronto Maple Leafs as they appear on the Stanley Cup.

Until now, the Magnuson award annually has recognized a single NHL alumnus “who has applied the intangibles of perseverance, commitment and teamwork developed through the game into a successful post-career transition.”

(The only exception was 2018, when Toronto’s Borje Salming and Mats Sundin and the Detroit Red Wings’ Nicklas Lidstrom were jointly honored.)

The 1967 championship was the most recent of 13 Stanley Cup titles won by the Toronto franchise -- 11 by the Maple Leafs, so named in 1927 by new owner Conn Smythe; one by the Arenas in 1918, the NHL’s inaugural season; and another by the St. Patricks in 1922.

Thirteen men who played for the 1966-67 Maple Leafs still are living, though only seven of them -- all forwards -- have their names engraved on the top of five silver bands of the Cup’s broad barrel: Hall of Famers Dave Keon, Frank Mahovlich and Bob Pulford, and Brian Conacher, Ron Ellis, Pete Stemkowski and Mike Walton.

Keon, who in 2016 was voted by a panel as the greatest Maple Leafs player of all time, was the Magnuson recipient last year but was unable to accept it during All-Star Game festivities in Sunrise, Florida, recovering from COVID-19 at home in Palm Beach Gardens.

Toronto Maple Leafs center Dave Keon with the 1967 Conn Smythe Trophy, voted to him as the most valuable player of the postseason. The presentation was made in the Hot Stove Lounge of Maple Leaf Gardens.

Now, the brilliant center will join his teammates in Toronto for his second consecutive Magnuson award.

“I couldn’t travel 60 miles to accept last year, but I can go 1,500 miles for this one,” Keon said with a laugh. “It’s a very nice honor for us. We’re coming to that time in our lives that there’s a dwindling number of players. It’ll be nice to get together with the remaining members of the team to celebrate this honor and reminisce about what we accomplished.”

No one need remind these champions that nearly 57 years later, the Maple Leafs have not been back to a Stanley Cup Final.

The 1966-67 team was a story for the ages in many ways. Struggling and dispirited under the almost tyrannical hand of coach and general manager Punch Imlach, the team slogged through a 10-game losing/11-game winless streak from Jan. 15 to Feb. 11, to this day Maple Leafs records for futility, tumbling out of the playoff picture.

Reportedly exhausted, Imlach was hospitalized Feb. 18, the team by then having won twice to pull gingerly out of its slump. The coaching was left to popular assistant GM King Clancy.

The 1966-67 Toronto Maple Leafs. Bottom row (from left): Coach/GM Punch Imlach, George Armstrong, co-owner John Bassett, co-owner Stafford Smythe, co-owner Harold Ballard, Bob Pulford, assistant GM King Clancy. Second row: Johnny Bower, Dave Keon, Larry Hillman, Red Kelly, Frank Mahovlich, Tim Horton, Bob Baun, Terry Sawchuk. Third row: Ron Ellis, Marcel Pronovost, Pete Stemkowski, Allan Stanley, Eddie Shack, Larry Jeffrey, Mike Walton. Top row: Trainer Bob Haggert, Milan Marcetta, Brian Conacher, Jim Pappin, Aut Erickson, equipment manager Tommy Naylor.

Invigorated, the Maple Leafs went 7-1-2 under the light hand of Clancy and turned as much a deaf ear to Imlach as they could upon the latter’s return, going 15-6-2 through the final 23 games to finish in third place, drawing the League-champion Black Hawks in the first round.

Toronto earned 75 points in the 70-game schedule (32-27-11), 19 points behind top-seeded Chicago (41-17-12), two behind the Canadiens (32-25-13).

Beyond the Maple Leafs dressing room, few gave semifinalist Toronto a chance against the firepower of the Black Hawks, whose NHL-leading 264 goals were 60 more than their opponent. That season, Chicago’s Stan Mikita became the first player in history to win the Hart Trophy as the League’s most valuable player, Art Ross Trophy for most points (97) and Lady Byng Trophy for gentlemanly play.

Bobby Hull led the charge up front, his 52 goals leading Mikita (35) and Chicago’s Kenny Wharram (31) for the League’s first, second and third rank in scoring. Meanwhile, the Black Hawks’ goaltending tandem of Denis Dejordy and Glenn Hall was winning the Vezina Trophy for the fewest goals allowed in the League, their 170 surrendered 38 fewer than the 208 scored on Toronto’s committee of Terry Sawchuk, Johnny Bower, Bruce Gamble, Gary Smith and Al Smith.

Maple Leaf Gardens early in the third period of the Montreal Canadiens’ 6-2 Game 4 victory in the 1967 Stanley Cup Final.

That the Maple Leafs clawed their way back into the postseason at all remains one of hockey’s great stories. The team was equal parts soap opera and horror movie under Imlach, whose bizarre, often bullying methods creating a toxic environment between management and the players, 11 of whom had been part of Toronto’s run of three consecutive championships from 1962-64.

The Maple Leafs were a team of very different parts, a fascinating blend of championship veterans with strong leadership skills and young, impressionable players skating their earliest shifts in the NHL.

“I had absolutely nothing in common with most of those guys,” said the undrafted Stemkowski, who was 23 as the season began. “I’m playing with guys in their mid-30s and older. I’m listening to the Beatles and they’re listening to whatever.

“When I got there (full-time in 1965-66), I’m a new kid on the block. I’d won the Memorial Cup with the Toronto Marlboros in 1964 (as had Ellis and Walton), but back then you had to prove yourself.

“If you’re a top draft pick now, you get a lot of respect immediately, people know what you can do. Back then, it was, ‘Show me what you can do.’ The first month I barely got a ‘good morning’ out of these guys. But I fit in when I started to produce (13 goals, 22 assists that season).”

Toronto Maple Leafs forward Pete Stemkowski during a game against the Montreal Canadiens at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Captain George Armstrong called a team meeting Jan. 30, Toronto having lost seven straight. He strongly suggested that everyone try to put aside their loathing of Imlach for the good of the team, but three more losses and a tie followed, shortly before the coach took ill and temporarily stepped aside.

But not before Imlach had called out his veterans for what he said was their lack of leadership, charging that Keon, Mahovlich, Pulford and Eddie Shack weren’t earning their pay.

“By that stage, the team had decided that we were going to win this, or lose it, as a team by ourselves,” said Conacher, a rookie who would find Semifinal success on a line with Keon and Mahovlich, Armstrong injured for the first three games of the playoffs. “This wasn’t going to be about the coach.”

“Yes, that happened. And it happened in the playoffs, too,” Keon saud of Maple Leafs players looking within, beyond Imlach.

Toronto Maple Leafs forward Brian Conacher comes to the aid of goalie Johnny Bower during a game at Maple Leaf Gardens. From left: Jean-Guy Talbot, Bower, Conacher, Yvan Cournoyer, Tim Horton and Pete Stemkowski.

“This wasn’t going to be about someone screaming and threatening that they’re going to send you down to the minors, Imlach sending Pappin up and down, up and down with Rochester (of the American Hockey League),” Conacher said. “After we broke our losing streak (with a 4-4 tie at Chicago on Feb. 11), our whole psychology and dynamic changed. We knew we had good players. Until then, we just didn’t have a good team.”

The Canadiens were two seasons out of a “slump” that had seen them fail to win the Stanley Cup for four consecutive seasons after having won an unprecedented five straight from 1956-60.

The Maple Leafs had been swept by the Canadiens in a 1966 Semifinal, outscored 15-6, but arrived at training camp that fall in Peterborough, Ontario with at least modest hopes of a better showing.

It was a different Maple Leaf Gardens dressing room into which they would walk. Gone were the inspirational words “Defeat Does Not Rest Lightly On Their Shoulders,” painted there in 1931 by owner Conn Smythe upon the arena’s opening, replaced with “The Price of Success is Hard Work.”

Imlach followed the latter motto to the letter.

Toronto Maple Leafs coach Punch Imlach relaxes with the Stanley Cup in his team’s dressing room after their 1967 championship.

“Sure, I work them hard,” he said. “Old players have to work harder than the young guys if they’re going to keep up with them. If there isn’t any substitute for experience, there isn’t any substitute for work, either.”

Under Imlach, training camp was typically chaotic. Mahovlich, whose 32 goals the previous season had led his team, would sit out the first two regular-season games, haggling with his tight-fisted GM over a new contract.

The Big M, who had signed a four-year, $100,000 deal on the opening day of the 1961-62 season, dug in his heels during 1966 camp, seeking a raise, and was suspended; he finally signed a one-year contract worth $35,000, with bonus clauses, after having bought a share of travel agency during his holdout.

Keon had signed just hours before season opener, a 4-4 home-ice tie against the New York Rangers on Oct. 22.

If the Maple Leafs weren’t blinded by the expectation of their fans, they were struggling with 54 bulbs of 5,000 watts each installed over Gardens ice for the benefit of home viewers who were buying color TVs. An estimated 70,000 Canadians had upgraded from their black-and-white sets.

Toronto Maple Leafs’ Frank Mahovlich (left) and Bob Pulford in 1960s promotional photos taken at Maple Leaf Gardens.

“The puck is just a big blur to me,” defenseman Kent Douglas said. “The glare off the ice is blinding.”

Douglas asked Imlach, unsuccessfully, whether he could wear a baseball cap, so he and other players took to wearing burnt cork under their eyes.

It was a badly dented roster that began the season with Pulford, fellow forward Red Kelly and defensemen Bob Baun, Marcel Pronovost and Allan Stanley all dealing with injuries.

Scoring twice for Toronto on opening night was Brian Conacher, hailing from a royal sports family in the Queen City. The son of late NHL and Toronto football star Lionel Conacher and nephew of Charlie and Roy Conacher, two long-time multiteam NHL stars, he got his first two NHL points in his fourth career game.

At 22, Conacher was a youngster on a grizzled roster. The average age of the Maple Leafs, as of their May 2, 1967 Cup-clinching win, was 31 years, 13 days. To that point, they were the NHL’s oldest titlist, the 1963-64 Toronto roster averaging 30 years, 180 days.

Toronto Maple Leafs forward Ron Ellis and his wife, Jan, pose with the Stanley Cup on May 5, 1967. Other trophies commemorate milestone goals by Frank Mahovlich, Mike Walton, Pete Stemkowski and George Armstrong, as well as the Trans Canada Air Lines Trophy voted to goalie Terry Sawchuk for his outstanding 1967 postseason play. At right: Ellis with the puck from his first career goal, scored Oct. 17, 1964 at home against the Boston Bruins.

(Only two champions since 1967 have been older on average, each time the Detroit Red Wings -- 31 years, 332 days in 2007-08, and 31 years, 296 days in 2001-02.)

Almost two decades separated youngest from oldest on the 1967 winners; Ron Ellis was 22 years, 114 days old the night the Cup was awarded, goalie Johnny Bower the roster’s most senior at 42 years, 175 days.

Toronto was wearing a new crest on its sweaters for the playoffs, the time-honored jagged-edge maple leaf replaced by one of 11 points that had been introduced on Canada’s new flag in 1965 and was featured to promote the Centennial.

Thirteen members of the Maple Leafs’ 1964 champion were back in 1967, eleven ultimately winning the Cup in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1967.

“There was something familiar when we got to training camp,” Pulford said. “We were a very close group of players, basically the same group year after year.”

Toronto Maple Leafs goalie Johnny Bower (left, in color; right, in black and white) with teammate Terry Sawchuk in studio and dressing-room photos.

Keon, the tireless, superb two-way player, would lead regular-season scoring with 52 points (19 goals, 33 assists), as many points as Chicago’s Bobby Hull had goals, six points ahead of Mahovlich (18 goals, 28 assists).

Imlach would play five goalies, using Sawchuk (28 games), Bower (27) and Gamble (23) almost equally. But as the playoffs dawned, greybeards Sawchuk (2.81 goals-against average, .917 save percentage) and Bower (2.65 GAA, .925 save percentage) would carry the load.

The coach did nothing to endear himself to his players while Toronto prepared to face Chicago in the Semifinals, having won four, lost eight and tied two against the Black Hawks in their 14 regular-season games. The Maple Leafs had scored 37 goals to their rival’s 55 and gone 0-6-1 at raucous Chicago Stadium.

After training camp, preseason games, team-mandated personal appearances, a 70-game schedule and a punishing physical and psychological grind to qualify for the postseason, Imlach assembled his team for a boot camp in Peterborough, Ontario, skated them to exhaustion then went into Chicago and predictably absorbed a 5-2 beating in Game 1.

Back to Peterborough, fewer wind sprints and a stunning 3-1 upset win followed in Game 2 to tie the series.

Toronto Maple Leafs goalie Terry Sawchuk makes a pad save on Chicago Black Hawks’ Stan Mikita during a game at Maple Leaf Gardens. Dave Keon is in the background, Tim Horton sprawling behind Mikita.

As the Canadiens blew past the Rangers in a four-game sweep, the Maple Leafs and Black Hawks were locked in a ferocious battle, Toronto scoring a 3-1 Game 3 victory back at home, Chicago rallying 4-3 to even the series.

Bower started Game 5 in Chicago but nursing an injured hand and shaky in allowing two first-period goals, he yielded the net for the start of the second to Sawchuk, who already was heavily battered through four games, wanting no part of action.

The defining moment came with the ice still wet when Hull nearly decapitated the veteran goalie. On rubbery legs, Sawchuk struggled to his skates and stayed in the game, his left collarbone numb from a blast that that had almost splintered it. It was one of 15 saves he made in the second period, another 22 to follow in the third in Toronto’s 4-2 victory.

“Terry Looks Like 97 But Plays Like 60,” the Chicago Tribune’s headline read the next day.

“I’m dead,” Sawchuk whispered to reporters postgame. “I’m so tired and sore. Maybe Hull’s shot woke me up. It hit me on the left shoulder. I don’t know, everything hurts.”

The goalie was asked about his view of the shot that had toppled him.

Rock-solid defenseman Allan Stanley, here in an early 1960s portrait, won Stanley Cup championships in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1967 with the Toronto Maple Leafs, his fourth of five NHL teams during a 1,244-game, 22-season career.

“Are you kidding?” he replied. “All you do is hope that the puck hits you, especially when Bobby Hull is the guy at the other end. There’s no skill to making that save.”

Sawchuk was lauded in each dressing room for a courageous performance.

“Terry has so many black, blue, green and yellow bruises that his body resembles the relief map of Alberta,” a team doctor said.

But Sawchuk was back in goal two nights later for Game 6 when the Maple Leafs stunned heavily favored Chicago 3-1 in Toronto to advance to the Stanley Cup Final, just one night off before the series began in Montreal on April 20 against the well-rested Canadiens.

One of Canada’s two NHL teams would soon be crowned champion in the country’s Centennial year, the cocky Canadiens looking past their opponent to a Montreal parade that never happened.

Top photo: Toronto Maple Leafs captain George Armstrong and his teammates with the 1967 Stanley Cup, on Maple Leaf Gardens ice on May 2, 1967.

Coming Thursday, Part 2