NHL'S DRAMA MORE PARODY THAN PARITY

The Wonderful World of Gary Bettman's Great Leap to establish the NFL on skates can chalk up one success.

Success might have to be set off in quotation marks, although an open mind is recommended. This feeling has been percolating for a couple weeks now, perhaps only a resistance to the bombardment of will-they-or-won't-they about the Leafs' playoff lives, which still maintains a EKG reading after last night's 5-2 expiration against the New York Islanders.

There's an element of the whole playoff race that just seems forced. The unbalanced schedule, the point-for-everybody setup with all the overtimes and shootouts, has created the NFL on skates, minus the U.S. television revenues and Pacman Jones.

Where's the clarity sports fans generally prefer? The NHL now has something like the NFL, where late in the season you're regularly subjected to bullflop about how 23 or 24 of the league's 32 teams are still alive for a playoff spot -- yes, even the Arizona Cardinals with a 5-9 record. (This was actually the case a couple years ago.) In football, with the parity scheduling weak teams become, voila, good overnight, but it means no one can really tell the difference between who's bona fide and who isn't worth a damn. Teams lack an identity. Never mind that fans would rather have someone help them figure out who's good and who isn't worth a damn.

There are more good players than there were 20 years ago, which has evened out the talent level everywhere except Chicago (the AHL's Wolves notwithstanding). That's created a kind of parity everyone can live with.

Then there's the other kind of parity, which is a parody. One team, as New York has, gets eight games against the worst team in the league and one of its rivals for a playoff spot gets only four chances to beat up on the Flyers. They don't play the same teams from the other conference, and you can get a point in the standings for playing just well enough to lose -- there's just so much potential for the wrong team to benefit.

The Islanders might still be better than the Leafs and Canadiens. No format, save for a shorter regular season, could override the reality the poor conditioning the Leafs were criticized for under former coach Pat Quinn has risen to the fore lately. Players' aerobic and anaerobic thresholds don't improve overnight.

Don't miss the point, though: The NHL has created a muddle. It's cynical and it does a disservice to the game, since like the NFL, it's a tacit admission that hockey is only interesting when your team still has a shot at winning something -- and we know otherwise. Contrast that with baseball, where a September game between two long-out-of-it teams can still be riveting, since you're watching highly skilled people practise their craft -- powered by something they cannot define -- and that alone create high stakes. (Sorry it that sounded a little too much like the Cake song The Distance.)

The players and coaches on the two teams who are left on the outside looking in after the Islanders' final game vs. the Devils on Sunday afternoon will say the usual Cliches 101 stuff about, "We honestly believe we had the better team," and you know, they might be right. We just won't know; what

So are the Islanders going to win the final Eastern playoff berth and face the Sabres in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, or will it be the Leafs or Canadiens? It's essentially arbitrary. Even for a Leafs follower, it's hard to buy in without feeling a bit like a tool of Gary Bettman, the cable sports networks and Hockey Night in Canada. By extension, if you plan on taking pleasure in seeing the Leafs or Habs go down, you're an even bigger tool.

What the NHL has given us -- and talk about lucking out that it has the historical weight of Leafs-Canadiens -- makes great TV. It just isn't necessarily compelling sport. Sure, it's exciting right now. In a couple years, if this final-week frenzy keeps up with no clarity over who's really a playoff team, it will quickly become tired.

Just like the Leafs in the third period last night.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.