So What Was the Regular Season For?

Some brief dead-horse beating . . . 

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.

New Rules For Today's Sports

New Rule: A woman you have never met, by definition, is not your girlfriend.

Evidently this rule was not already in force in Indiana or Hawai'i.

New Rule: Lying, cheating, harassing, slandering and litigating for 15 years is not ameliorated in the slightest by an admission after conviction.

This rule remains in force but evidently at least one person and his well-paid advisers believe it can be circumvented.

New Rule: Writing a silly book hectoring your former employer is not the best revenge. Living well, by bringing a pennant to Cleveland, is.

Evidently you can get a job as a leader of men without knowing this rule.

New Rule: A top-ranked college basketball team that defeats the #2, #3, #4 and #5 teams and then drops a league road contest to #16 is still the #1 team in the land.
              Part B of New Rule: Even if it is Duke.

This rule does not seem to have widespread support.

New Rule: Anyone demonstrating sufficiently dim wits to assert that winning four of four Super Bowls is superior to winning four of six should be banned from the radio airwaves until they can credibly explain how leading a team to six championship games is a lesser accomplishment than leading a team to four.

The people who would have to enforce this rule are equally dimwitted.

New Rule: The rule requiring the L.A. Lakers to make the NBA playoffs is hereby repealed.

This rule is supported in 49 of 50 states but is unlikely to be enforced. Again.

New Rule: The NHL will have a labor dispute that eliminates all games before January every year.

This rule is evidently already in force.

More and More and More Playoffs: Blecch

My newspaper tells me that tonight's NFL tilt between Atlanta and Detroit will help determine whether the Falcons clinch home field advantage on the road to the Super Bowl. The implication is that the contest is significant for this reason despite decades of experience.

In fact, tonight's clash is a near total irrelevance. The last two Super Bowl champs staggered to 9-7 records and slipped into the playoffs in the last week before eliminating all those 13-3 and 12-4 behemoths with home field advantage.

In fact, in American professional sports today simply making the playoffs is the entire goal. Period. After that, flip a coin.

Don't believe me? The football Giants weren't the only team last year to parlay a mediocre regular season into a crown. The L.A. Kings stumbled into the NHL playoffs with more losses than wins, qualified last and then swept through their conference with easy wins over the #1, #2 and #3 seeds before winning the cup in six games.

The 2011 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals snuck into the post-season on the last day of the regular season with the worst record in the playoffs. (The 2012 World Series champs, the division-winning S.F. Giants, were a legitimate champion.)

During a thankfully truncated NBA season, the Miami Heat faced boobirds and derision because of a 9-8 start before capturing the #2 seed in the East and winning it all.

So when the NHL announces that half its season is lost, even hockey fans should applaud. Forty games seems about right if all they're going to do is eliminate a handful of awful teams. (On the other hand, the league and its players appear on the verge of another Armageddon. All involved have a bright future in Congress, once they earn their American citizenship.)

And we should all laugh when the sport's advocates promote a meaningless match-up like tonight's Falcon-Lion snoozer, as a playoff positioner. Anyone paying the least bit of attention anytime over the last three decades realizes there's no such thing.

A good rule of thumb for playoffs should be this: Qualifying should be sufficiently difficult that some good teams get left out. That ensures that playoff qualifying is an accomplishment and that a good team will win the title irrespective of who catches fire for a couple of weeks in the post-season. Major League baseball and the NFL are both straddling the line, which the NBA and NHL long ago breached.

The NFL is reportedly considering the addition of two more teams to its playoff lineup. It is difficult to overstate how awesomely awful this idea is. Adding two more palyoff slots guarantees that an 8-8 team will parlay a couple of fluke wins into a Super Bowl championship. Blecch.

Achievement of Omission

You probably didn't notice that the Montreal Canadiens defeated the Washington Capitals 2-1 in game 7 of their opening round (i.e., there are rounds to go before we can even start calling them names, like quarterfinals) series. 

You didn't notice because, let's face it, who can keep track of the hundreds of hockey playoff games?

You can also be forgiven for failing to notice that the Habs were the bottom seed in the tournament and the Caps were the top seed. You'd think that would be back page news, right?

Ha! Nearly one-third of the match-ups between the best team in the conference during the regular season and some below .500 also-ran goes to the mediocrity. Eight seeds are 9 of 32 in these series over the 16 years they've existed.

Of course, this makes you wonder the point of the regular season in the NHL. Thank you Major League Baseball for your omission in that regard.

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Olympics: The Anti-NHL

Apparently, you do have to hit Gary Bettman on the head with a sledge hammer more than a once for him to get it. While you were enjoying the thrilling ice hockey tournament at the 2010 Olympics, Bettman and his NHL cohorts were busy failing to learn the key lesson of the games: people are excited about hockey; it's the National Hockey League that bores them.

Bettman is currently dragging his feet with Sochi, Russia about taking a two-week hiatus in the NHL season for the 2014 Olympics because the Olympics haven't delivered the expected interest-bump to the NHL. This is like Nome, Alaska complaining that tourism didn't increase after an ad campaign for Honolulu.

Here's the painful truth that the lords of the NHL have managed to ignore for 20 years: the Olympic tournament is everything that the NHL is not. The Olympics presents a two-week tournament in which every game matters. It makes for terrific matches with everything on the line.

It's exactly the same in the National Hockey League -- in the sense that it's totally different. Thirty teams play 82 games each through the fall and winter in order to eliminate the most dreadful 14. Then they start all over again and have the remaining 16 teams play as many as another 28 more games in the spring to decide the champion. By the time some strapping Jacque is kissing Lord Stanley's cup, the world has gone to the beach and forgotten about games played on ice.

Instead of holding the players hostage, Commissioner Bettman should consider learning something from the Olympics. If he wants his league -- once the fourth major sport; now simply irrelevant -- to matter at all, he should shorten the season, slash the playoffs in half and crown a champ by tax day. In the short term, the league will lose revenue. But it will gain relevance, which is ultimately a lot more important. Maybe the NHL representatives from Canada can tell him about it while they kiss their gold medals.

MLB Staying True To The Game

The NBA and NHL are turning the ignition on their playoffs, which is always a good time for baseball. These two leagues have taken wonderful sports and diluted them to the point of irrelevance, a vivid contrast to baseball.

It's interesting too how basketball and hockey are so far apart on the playoff loop that they're in the same place. In the NBA, half the teams make the playoffs, but only four or five have any realistic chance of winning the championship. It makes the final weeks of the season and the first few rounds of the playoffs largely meaningless.

Hockey's just the opposite. There's little correlation between regular season performance and Stanley Cup results, meaning any team that makes the tournament has a realistic shot if its goalie gets hot. (The top regular season team in the league has never won the Cup in the expanded playoff format.) Since seeding is insignificant, so is most of the season. The only part of the regular season that matters in the NHL is the last two weeks as middle feeders battle for the final playoff spots. Ironically, the sports media seems to stop paying what little attention they give hockey at just that point.

As we inaugurate the baseball season, who's a playoff lock? The Yankees, Sox and Rays have to contend with each other. The Cubs look like a good bet, but so did Enron. And who's playing for honorable mention? The Pirates, Padres and Nationals to be sure, and I wouldn't want my life to depend on the Mariners, Orioles, Blue Jays or Astros either. Nonetheless, each of them has a better shot than the #8 seeds in the NBA playoffs, who have to beat Cleveland and L.A. respectively.

It's another feather to add to Bud Selig's hat. Most baseball fans think of him as Bozo the Commissioner, but there's a lot to be said for avoiding the temptation to rob Peter's regular season to pay Paul's playoffs. Have fun NBA and NHL, and let me know when you're done.

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