The Maple Leaf Gardens are hallowed grounds.
All of the Leafs’ 13 Stanley Cup wins took place before they moved up Yonge Street to the lakeshore, in the iconic building on Carlton Street in downtown Toronto. This was a multi-dimensional building, with the everyone from The Beatles to Elvis playing there and Muhammad Ali fighting there.
This building played host to sports other than hockey, though, and hosted a variety of sports, including basketball. This building has a rich history, and this photo from a basketball game on January 16th, 1946, has us appreciating just how storied the city’s sports roots are.
This was the first basketball games ever played at Maple Leaf Gardens, which saw the University of Toronto Varsity Blues tip off against the University of Western Ontario Mustangs, followed by the featured game of the evening; the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons against the Rochester Royals.
Later that year, on November 26th, The Gardens would have the chance to host its own professional basketball team, when the Toronto Huskies played their inaugural game against the New York Knickerbockers in the Basketball Association of America league.
The Huskies would only last a year before folding, and it took 50 years for professional basketball to return to Toronto, not including the 16 games that the NBA’s Buffalo Braves played at the Maple Leaf Gardens in the 70s.
The Raptors came to Toronto in 1995, and played their first four seasons at the SkyDome while they awaited the completion of the Air Canada Centre.
Basketball in Toronto has come a long way in less than a century, and these photos really capture the gravity of it.
