Toronto Maple Leafs
Rink: Maple Leaf Gardens
Capacity: 15,847
Built: 1931
Closed: 2000
Heavily Renovated/Reopened: 2012
League: NHL
City: Toronto, Ontario
Home Of: Toronto Maple Leafs
Games Attended: 1
Only Game: October 4, 1998 vs Chicago
Unique Arena: #1
NHL Arena: #1
On October 4, 1998, I had the pleasure of attending a Toronto Maple Leafs game at Maple Leaf Gardens as they began their final season at that venue before heading to the Air Canada Centre that February. With the game being two months shy of my 10th birthday and me not exactly in rink review mode in my life yet, I can’t say I can give an honest arena review of the Carlton St Cashbox. So, what follows is my memory and experience from that night that I wish I could remember more vividly… and god do I wish I had taken photos.
The story of my first ever ticketed sporting event of my life came about very abruptly. On a Sunday morning in early October, I got a call from my dad asking if I would like to go to that night’s Toronto Maple Leafs game. I was so excited to be finally going to one in person that I was jumping off the walls all day until the time came for my dad to pick me up. I was even more pumped when he showed up with a Leafs sweatshirt for me to wear. As I said, I don’t remember every detail of that night, but I remember upon walking into the building the sudden mass of humanity I was now a part of. I was tall for my age, but I felt small amongst the crowd, keeping hold of my dad so as not to get lost.
My next vivid memory was walking the concourse upstairs. We had seats in the grays towards the opposite end of the rink in section 84, so after getting upstairs we walked from one end of the building to the other to get to our section. As we walked by each opening to the stands, I kept trying to look in to catch glimpses as we walked. I couldn’t see much but I did notice one thing. We were higher than the scoreboard! I didn’t know that was possible!
You always hear stories from people that when they go to a place for the first time they can’t get over how huge said place is. Well for me it was kind of the opposite as we sat down, and I laid my eyes on a real-life NHL arena for the first time. Don’t get me wrong, MLG was big. The ceiling went up forever. But as I looked down on the ice surface it looked small! Not in a ‘we were so far from the ice in the cheap seats’ sort of way. I just expected that 200′ x 85′ sheet of ice to be much bigger than it was. TV always made it look so far from one end to the other.
Another thing that blew my mind was seeing line changes for the first time in person. When watching a game on TV, 90% of the time when teams are changing on the fly, they dump the puck into the opposing zone, and the camera stays with the lone defender chasing the puck or just simply standing behind the net with it waiting for the line change to finish so he can make a breakout pass. Me seeing some 17 guys on ice at once as they all changed up was baffling to me. I guess before that I thought a player couldn’t step on the ice before the guy he’s replacing has totally stepped off.
In the end the Leafs and the Chicago Blackhawks skated to a 2-2 tie (remember those?) in what was for them a meaningless preseason game. While the game didn’t have any meaning for them, it certainly meant the world to me getting to watch my first NHL game in person, feeling important as I had gotten to be one of the first to see Curtis Joseph play live for the Leafs after signing in Toronto that summer. I never got to another game at Maple Leaf Gardens before it closed for good in 2000.
For the next decade the Gardens sat locked up, empty and dark with the odd photo video clip leaking out. But in the early 2010s the renovations finally took place with a new Loblaws grocery store going in at ground level and the top two floors given to Toronto Metropolitan University for a space now known as the Mattamy Athletic Centre. While TMU signage now exists on the outside they have thankfully restored the original Maple Leaf Gardens signage above the main entrance on Carlton St. A new arena now sits inside Maple Leaf Gardens but the ice surface is now three floors up about at the level that the highest seats in the old Gardens sat. The new arena seats about 2,500 people and is designed as a 1/8 size Maple Leaf Gardens with most seating down the sides, limited corner seats and two small balconies with two rows of seats hanging over the nets. There is no centre ice scoreboard but two with small videoboards that hang on the walls in each end of the rink.
I went in for the updated photos you see above in September 2025 and despite the arena being so different and me not being inside since 1998 when I was nine years old, I was hit by a giant wave of nostalgia. There was definitely a vibe about the place. There are tons of old photos on display from Gardens events over the decades and some original seats hanging on the walls above the escalators heading up to the rink. The rink today is home to the TMU Bold men and women’s teams. The Toronto PWHL team called the rink home for their first season before it became clear they would need a bigger space, and they moved to Coca-Cola Coliseum after one season. My hope one day is that perhaps the OHL could stage some sort of game there, even for a preseason game.
Games Attended
October 4, 1998: Toronto 2 – Chicago 2