The story, and history of Maple Leaf Gardens is well documented.

It has been described as having religious significance, there is reverence and well earned-lore. A loathsome thread exists too.

Without question it is one of the most significant buildings ever constructed in Canada and a big part of its legend is that it was completed during the early years of the Great Depression.

But what was Toronto Maple Leafs’ owner Conn Smythe’s intent? Why did he build it where he did? What crowd did he want to attract and how do those spectators compare to what our notions of them would be? How did this venerated structure meet the times it evolved from?

These are questions that Russell Field (Associate Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management, the University of Manitoba) examines in A Night at the Gardens: Class, Gender, and Respectability in 1930s Toronto.

Explore the origin and early days of Maple Leaf Gardens through an academic lense.

Hakeem Olajuwon left Lagos, Nigeria in 1980 and barely a year after taking up basketball, he blossomed into the game’s first international star in Houston, first collegiately with the Cougars and then with the NBA’s Rockets.

In an 18-season career he was a nine-time NBA all-star and two-time league champion. He played his last season with the Toronto Raptors. Olajuwon was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013 and is a member of the NBA's 75th anniversary team.

In “Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon,” biographer Mirin Fader draws on some 250 interviews to present a silent sports star who experienced a religious metamorphosis. A fiery competitor who led by example in all aspects of his life, paying it forward with teammates and current NBA stars through the type of mentorship he benefited from early in his career. She also utilizes her extensive research to debunk myths surrounding Hakeem’s life and career.

Fader is a senior writer with The Ringer. Her début book, “Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA MVP,” reached The New York Times best-seller list.

Every hockey fan knows how it always ends for the Vancouver Canucks — no Stanley Cup — but Ed Willes digs in the corners to poke at the why, with a wry perspective.

The veteran journalist (Regina Leader-Post, The Province) presents a case study, with novelistic detail, about the West Coast NHL franchise. Weaving a thread — one of instability at the top — through the history (and prehistory) of the team, Willes explains why the Canucks have fallen short of winning the Stanley Cup, but have never been boring across five-plus decades of torment.

Relying on firsthand research and contemporary accounts from fellow Vancouver sports journalists, Willes provides painstaking details about the life-arcs of stars such as Henrik Sedin, Daniel Sedin, Pavel Bure, Markus Näslund, and Todd Bertuzzi. The author also playfully teases out the franchise’s many what-ifs.

Willes is also author of “The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association” (2005) and “End Zones and Border Wars: The Era of American Expansion in the CFL” (2013).