Toronto hockey fans hoodwinked, again

Back in the 1880s a guy named George C. Parker told people he owned the Brooklyn Bridge. Then he sold it to them for hard cash. It worked over and over again, until Parker was eventually sent to Sing Sing prison where he died.

I’m reminded of this scam every spring when the Toronto Maple Leafs fail to win the Stanley Cup.

The last time they won was 1967. Two-thirds of the people living in Canada today weren’t alive in 1967. If they are Leaf fans, they aren’t just long-suffering, they are forever-suffering.

And yet, every October these fans rev up their engines for another six months of what is essentially a meaningless regular season. How do NHL owners get away with it? They make teams play 82 games each, 1,312 games leaguewide, to win exactly nothing.

Oh, right. They win the right to be in the playoffs. I’ve seen that trick at Disney World. You line up outside for Space Mountain, wending your way up and down the maze until you get to the door, and when you make it inside you see … a brand-new line. Gotcha! At least you get to enjoy the ride at the end. Leaf fans never get out of the line.

It’s not just Leaf fans who are being taken. The NHL isn’t the only league running this scheme. The regular season in every professional sport has become an ever-expanding series of games that do very little to move a team much closer to the only thing the matters — winning a championship.

Basketball has adopted a clever system. When the regular season is exhausted, it doesn’t go straight to the playoffs. Instead, it tortures the worst eight teams still standing with a series of so-called play-in games. That is, they see who can play themselves into the playoffs. Well, what was the regular season all about? The winners of the play-in round have still won nothing, and they’re still unlikely to win the championship, but if people will pay to watch, the league is happy to count the money.

Baseball used to be the exception to this unseemly greed. Each team plays 162 games. After all that, if a team was good enough to be tops in the American League or tops in the National League, you were in the World Series. Seven games later, at most, it was all over.

Such sweet innocence couldn’t possibly last. Major

League Baseball has now adopted a playoff scheme so complicated that only a mathochist could love.

The regular seasons of professional sports are selling what carnival barkers sell. Step right up and see the hocus-pocus. It looks like something’s happening, but nothing really is. If you think an NHL hockey game in January is important, if you think victory or defeat has a lot to do with whether your team is going to win the Stanley Cup, I have a bridge to sell you.