The complaint here about professional basketball and hockey in North America has always been that they play 80 games each for no apparent reason, allow mediocrity into the badly-devalued playoffs, drag through weeks of post-season revenue generation (the "post" season -- practically an admission in itself that the "season" is irrelevant) before finally getting, anti-climatically, to the point.
The conference finals are now starting in the NBA and NHL and they provide a stark case in point.
In the NBA, all the silliness has been dispatched after voluminous faux drama and over-wrought analysis and the result is exactly what you could have predicted on the first day of the season. The finals comprise not only the top two seeds in each conference but also the best teams entering the season, lo those many months ago. Indeed, they are the very same teams that squared off in last year's conference finals.
Maybe even more to the point, the favorites in each series -- the teams that met in last year's championship series -- are the two most notable for their disdain of the regular season. San Antonio's coach has been fined for resting his stars during meaningless January contests. Miami, clearly the most talented outfit, coasted though the long gauntlet with the singular goal of getting its number two star healthy come crunch time.
Put another way, a season that has slogged through six months is now finally beginning in earnest in month seven.
Hockey has the same issue -- except in reverse. After eliminating only a handful of awful teams following a full season of play, the NHL playoffs have given us two five seeds, a four seed and a six seed in the conference finals. How a team performs in the regular season is utterly, completely, inexcusably meaningless as long as it makes the cut, a bar so low as to be laughable.
Once in the tournament, winning in hockey seems to be more about a hot goaltender, a healthy team and some fortunate bounces of the puck than anything else.
Put another way, a winter sport has slogged through six months to determine absolutely nothing. The winner of the Cup will not be able to claim it is the best hockey club, or the second best or anything except the survivor of a tournament that will finally conclude in the opposite hemisphere's winter.
There are great story lines, and should be inspiring competition, in these four series. I'll be watching.
For the first time since last May.
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