Damien Cox is no stranger to the Toronto Maple Leafs. He is entering his fifth decade as a journalist, with the bulk of those years spent covering the Leafs. With REVIVAL, this becomes his third book solely focused on the team with a few others covering hockey on the whole. REVIVAL reunites Cox with Gord Stellick with whom he wrote the 2004 release “67: The Maple Leafs, Their Sensational Victory, and The End of an Empire”. What better place to pick their partnership back up than to write about the 70s, a decade where the team danced on the bubble of relevancy before everything burst and the 80s made them the laughing stock of the league.

I’d like to consider myself a fairly rabid fan of the Leafs. I own over two dozen jerseys, countless items around my home have the team crest slapped on them and I rarely, if ever, miss a game. That being said, I have a blind spot when it comes to much of the team’s history in the years before I became a fan in the early 90s. It was fascinating to read about how before the last decade, the 1970s would be the last time the Leafs would build a team through the draft. Their core of Sittler, McDonald, Williams and Salming all came to the team through careful drafting and scouting. The authors uncover the controversy created when Börje Salming and Inge Hammarström entered the ranks of the NHL from Europe where they were relentlessly taunted and physically targeted by North American players, which only intensified following the ’72 Summit series.

And of course, how can you talk about the 70s without writing about bloated windbag team owner Harold Ballard? In an era where the NHL was struggling against upstart rival league the WHA, it did the team no favors to have someone the likes of noted cheapskate Ballard having to pony up the extra cash to keep star players from jumping ship. Cox and Stellick underline all the ways in which he was bad for the team and the way he would constantly undermine players and don’t even get me started on what he did after the deep playoff run of ’78.

In terms of analyzing the sport’s penchant for brutality in the post expansion era, this would fit right alongside Stephen Cole’s 2015 book HOCKEY NIGHT FEVER. Cox and Stellick look at just how close the game came to having on-ice antics make it into the courtroom with players being straight-up assaulted by hot-heads in an effort to win games. Stick swinging was still the norm in an era where helmets were optional and head injuries were commonplace. Look up the case of Tes Green v. Wayne Maki from a game between the Bruins and the Blues in Ottawa in September, 1969 for some nightmare fuel.

For anyone curious about not just the team’s history, but more about the tumultuous decade of the 1970s which saw a ruthless competitor arise, Soviet domination on the world stage, and the game’s turn to violence over skill, this is the book for you.