Serious Hockey fans only please:?

Here's my thoughts, I am a serious hockey fan, but this is still mostly speculation. The team's logo is a single leaf, not a bunch of leaves, right? So they're leafs because each one is a leaf and the team together is represented by one leaf, not a bunch of leaves blowing around or something like that. Just accept it, honey. Like most great sports traditions, there's no real explanation.

Conn Smythe was just that way. There was a baseball team in Toronto named the maple leafs, and he changed the hockey teams name from the St. Pats to the Maple Leafs, reportedly because he didnt want to seem to favour the Roman Cathoulics. The stadium that Conn Smythe had built for the team is the Maple Leaf Gardens. By the time the Smythe family had sold the team, there was so much tradition behind the team that the name will never change!

The Toronto Maple Leafs were originally the Toronto Areans then changed to the Toronto St.Patricks in 1919. The logo for the St.Patricks team was a three leaf clover. In 1927 the team changed it's name to the Maple Leafs in respect to their founding history. Each clover/stim on the leaf represents the English, Scottish, and Irish people that settled in Canada. The Maple Leaf is their national symbol.

One story is that when Conn Smythe bought the team in 1927, he named it after the Maple Leaf Regiment from WWI. Since the team is named after a group of people (the Maple Leaf regiment), it’s perfect English to refer to them as “the Leafs”, and not correct to use “the Leaves”.

That said, I have also read that a minor league baseball team had the same name for 30 years at that point, which would have dated the name to before WWI. He still could have named his team after the regiment, though.

Toronto Maple Leafs is a proper name. Proper names can be anything you want them to be, (which is why we have parents spelling their kids names with all kinds of ridiculous letters in them.)

Leafs is proper pluralization when referring to a Team. If you wanted to use the plural form of leaf in a sentence referring to anything other than a team it would be leaves. But the Toronto Maple Leafs is perfectly correct.

It's called plurals of headless nouns like lowlife and Red Sox, where the life and sox are not heads semantically; that is, a lowlife is not a type of life, nor are Red Sox a kind of sock. Thus, more than one lowlife is lowlifes and a single member of the Boston baseball team is a Red Sox. This includes the Toronto Maple Leafs, not Maple Leaves.

I believe "Leafs" is also proper in English-speaking countries that are not America.

Call them what you want, they still won't win a cup