Expect the Unexpected

Somebody with an adding machine has come up with the fascinating fact that there now are exactly 102 major-league professional sports teams in the U.S. The boom in pro sports may be great stuff for the ticket printers, pennant makers and hot-dog vendors, but it is pretty baffling to most ordinary people. Just who are the Anaheim Amigos and the Seattle Supersonics?* And what are the Los Angeles Kings doing on top of the National Hockey League?

In no other sport has expansion caused such confusion as it has in hockey. Last year there were six teams; this year there are twelve--with new clubs in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Minnesota and Oakland, as well as Los Angeles. All of the new teams, regardless of geographical location, are lumped together into a West Division, while all the oldsters, including the Chicago Black Hawks, are regarded as East. Regular-season team schedules go from October through March with 74 games, and what will happen when the Stanley Cup play-offs finally begin some time next spring is almost too frightening to contemplate.

Even Non-Canadians. For starters, the first and third teams in each division will play a best-of-seven series against each other. So will the second and fourth teams. The winners will then play a second best-of-seven series, and the survivors of that--if they can still stand up on their skates by then--will meet in still another best-of-seven series of games for the Cup. By then, it will probably be after Labor Day; kids will be back in school and some big-league baseball team will be taking orders for World Series tickets.

"Nobody seems to know quite what to expect--unless it's the unexpected," Montreal Gazette Columnist Dink Carroll wrote last month, when action in the expanded league got under way. Unexpected is certainly the word for what has happened since. The Chicago Black Hawks, who won the N.H.L. race by 17 points last year, have managed only three victories in twelve games this year, rank dead last in the East Division. Next, there is the curious collapse of Roger Crozier, the talented young (25) Detroit Red Wings goalie, who only three seasons ago was the N.H.L.'s Rookie of the Year; last week, after giving up 18 goals in three games, Crozier quit the sport.

Then there is the performance of the new teams. Stocked with castoffs, minor leaguers and even non-Canadians (five Americans, two Britons, one Pole), they were hardly expected to furnish much competition for the old, established clubs; experts estimated that it would take at least five years for the West Division to reach parity with the East. Over the past two weeks, West teams have played twelve games against the East--winning four and tying two. Last week, with an unsung goalie named Wayne Rutledge stopping 37 shots short of the net, the surprising Los Angeles Kings upset the Toronto Maple Leafs 4-1, and thereby tied the Maple Leafs with 17 points for first place in the overall N.H.L. standings.

New pro basketball teams, the Amigos in the American Basketball Association (which is also new), the Supersonics in the "old" National Basketball Association.

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