Dave Feschuk

Love them or hate them, they’re the most successful team in professional hockey … just not on the scoresheet.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are an exception to every law of the sporting jungle. They miss the playoffs and the sellouts keep coming. They haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967, but the earning power of that blue-and-white maple leaf, no matter the chronic woes of the blue-and-white’s power play, never ceases to increase. In this description of failure and prescription for hope, Toronto Star sports columnist Dave Feschuk and Globe and Mail sports reporter Michael Grange draw the illogical roadmap that pinpoints how the once-proud Leafs got lost in the sporting hinterlands, who’s to blame for stranding them there, and how they might extract themselves from this historic mire.

Dave Feschuk is a columnist for The Toronto Star who has written on a variety of sports, from hockey to hoops. His work on hockey has been nominated for a National Newspaper Award, cited in The Best American Sportswriting and included in The Way It Looks From Here: Contemporary Canadian Writing on Sports. Michael Grange is a sports reporter for The Globe and Mail and an award-winning magazine writer, writing in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment for much of his 14-year tenure at Canada’s national newspaper, the New York Times, and ESPN.