The OHL Arena Guide - Scotiabank Arena, Toronto St. Michael's Majors

First Visit: November 1, 2003 for NHL

The Air Canada Centre, as it was called then, opened in 1999 as a replacement for the legendary Maple Leaf Gardens. Since then, it's been a home to Toronto's pro arena teams, exactly as intended. The ACC's history as an OHL rink, on the other hand, is brief, but still worth mentioning. In the early 2000's, the St. Mike's Majors played the odd regular season game here as an attempt to draw in greater numbers of fans than the St. Michael's College Arena could hold. It actually did work, and the Majors drew reasonably well, but it was never anything more than an exhibition of building and team for a greater audience.

As an arena, the ACC is well laid-out and architecturally interesting, having been constructed out of Toronto's old Art Deco Postal Delivery Building. It has a huge main entryway which connects it to Union Station and also features ticket booths and the team store. Once inside, the ACC is pretty much what you'd expect - a normal hockey rink that's pretty quiet during games due to the corporate suits in the stands. The seats are multi-coloured, which is a gigantic plus in these days of bland blue and maroon seats everywhere, and the views aren't bad at all for such a huge building.

For Leafs games, the place has a traditional and historic atmosphere while at the same time being completely bland. The Leafs have die-hard fans, but they've been so effectively excluded from purchasing tickets for so long that the rink is silent most nights, with the only audible sounds being those of the game being pumped over the speakers. Seeing the Leafs in Toronto is a terrific Original Six experience, but it's a quiet one that doesn't even come close to matching other Original Six rinks in Detroit, Chicago or Montreal, and the ACC is still bland in comparison to the much-missed Maple Leaf Gardens.

Scotiabank Arena was never meant as anything more than an exhibition building for the OHL, and there isn't a lot to say about it. I've only been to two Leafs games at the ACC, and all it really did was make me miss the Gardens. With the Majors no longer existing and the Mississauga Steelheads doing reasonably well out there, it seems very unlikely that the OHL will play again at the ACC in the foreseeable future.