Really, who cares? Right? I wonder how many Maple Leafs fan even know the Leafs didn’t draft in 1965… let alone why?

I didn’t know, though there was no reason I should have known. I like NHL hockey but not THAT much to know such trivia. I wouldn’t have cared, either, except that in doing my first post for a Athletic Analytics, a sports analytics blog I’m starting with JavaScript visuals I can’t embed here, I saw an anomaly in the visual. Curiosity then got the better of me.

In the first post about the number of drafts in which NHL teams participated, I saw that the Toronto Maple Leafs had one fewer year of participation than the other five Original Six teams. I’m not a hockey historian but I know the Leafs had been around long before 1963 when the drafts started, so what was going on?

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