Social media accounts for the Toronto Maple Leafs have verified the deceased forward’s passing.
At the age of 79, Canadian ice hockey star Ron Ellis departed from this life. During his 15-year National Hockey League career, the former forward for the Toronto Maple Leafs played for the Ontario club. He scored 332 goals and 308 assists, for 640 points in 1,034 games, and was a member of the final Leafs squad to win the Stanley Cup.
The official Maple Leafs social media account announced Ellis’s death on Saturday; however, it withheld the cause of death.
We have learned with great sadness of Ron Ellis’s demise, the team said in a statement. Ron scored the fifth-most goals in the history of the team and was one of just five Maple Leafs to skate in more than 1,000 games. His loved ones and family are in our thoughts and prayers.
Having gone undrafted in his first ice hockey draft, Ellis played one game for the Maple Leafs in 1963–64 before being added to the squad full-time the following year. The former forward is fifth on the team’s all-time tally of games played with 1,034 appearances.
Ellis scored 20 goals or more in 11 of his outstanding seasons, and he also crossed the 30-goal threshold twice.
When Leafs star Ace Bailey asked the team to pull his iconic No. 6 jersey out of retirement so that Ellis could wear it for the final 11 seasons of his career before retiring, Ellis received a unique homage the year after he won the 1967 Stanley Cup.
Ellis played for Canada in the World Hockey Tournament two years after he had first retired from hockey at the age of thirty in 1975. At that point, he decided to rejoin the Maple Leafs to continue his NHL career.
After working in insurance and education, he eventually retired at the age of 36. In 1993, he became an assistant to the president and director of public affairs at the Hockey Hall of Fame. Ellis continued to serve as the HOF’s director of public affairs as of 2014.
