Leafs adding Keon, Horton and Broda to Legends Row

To celebrate their centennial season, the Toronto Maple Leafs will be adding three new faces to Air Canada Centre’s Legends Row.

Dave Keon, Tim Horton and Turk Broda statues will be unveiled next year, further cementing (no, bronzing?) their place as titans of Toronto hockey. They’ll join Mats Sundin, Teeder Kennedy, George Armstrong, Syl Apps, Borje Salming and Johnny Bower on the Row.

Keon, one of the finest two-way players to ever play the game, won four Stanley Cups with the Leafs in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1967 and sits third in all-time team scoring with 858 points in 1062 games with Toronto. It was never a matter of if Keon deserved to be honour on Legends Row, but simply when he would be.

Horton is widely regarded as one of the best blueliners to ever pull a Maple Leafs sweater over his head. As I wrote in our ‘All-Time Maple Leafs Team’ feature this past summer, he was “one of the game’s best stay-at-home defencemen, back when such players were actually useful.” Horton was also a four-time Stanley Cup Champion, winning all four alongside Keon.

Broda, unlike Keon or Horton above, did not make the cut on our TLN All-Time Leafs team, having been beaten out of a spot by Johnny Bower, Curtis Joseph and Felix Potvin (Thanks, Dangle). That said, Broda is no doubt one of the best goaltenders the Leafs ever employed, and was a mainstay in Toronto’s crease for nearly 14 seasons. Another four-time Stanley Cup Champ, Broda won it all in 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1951. As fellow TLNer Jon Steitzer so eloquently put it, “Broda was the original Martin Brodeur – he won Vezinas, he won Stanley Cups, and everyone thought he should lose weight.”