Playoffs & Profits

If Paul Bunyan. famed superman of lumber-camp legend, had been a hockey player, he would have liked a game that was played in Montreal last week. The two teams, Detroit Red Wings and Montreal Maroons, skated onto the ice at 8:30 p. m. At the end of the three standard 20-minute periods, neither team had made a goal. Because the rules in the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup playoffs prohibit ties, they went on playing.

One overtime period is an ordinary occurrence in hockey. In the playoffs, two or three "sudden death" periods, in which the game ends when a goal is scored, are not unheard of. At Montreal last week, Maroons and Red Wings skated wearily up & down the ice through four such periods of 20 minutes each, without breaking the tie. While the streets outside the Forum emptied and the city grew dark, while spectators alternately dozed and woke with hoarse shouts when it looked as if something might happen, the players went on grimly playing. In the middle of the fifth overtime period a drowsy spectator got hit by the puck. He was revived. Play went on. The period ended scorelessly. Exactly 16 1/2 minutes later, a Detroit second-stringer named Modere Bruneteau took a pass from his teammate Hector Kilrea, made one more perfunctory shot at Maroon Goalie Lorne Chabot, who had already stopped 66. The red bulb that flashes when a goal is scored gave a sudden and amazing wink. Sleepy watchers and exhausted players rubbed their eyes to make sure that they were not, dreaming. They were not. The longest National League hockey game ever played--2 hr., 56 1/2 min. of actual play--was over, 1-to-0 for the Red Wings.

When the playoffs started last week, each of the eight professional teams in the National Hockey League had played 48 games. Sole purpose of these, aside from making money, was to eliminate the weakest team from each of the two groups of four into which the League is arbitrarily divided. The teams eliminated were the New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadiens. The other six, in the order of their standing, at the season's end were:

International Group: Montreal Maroons, Toronto Maple Leafs, New York Americans.

American Group: Detroit Red Wings, Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks.

The dozen-odd playoff games are the only really significant ones of the year. In them the half-dozen leading teams battle for possession of the world's championship Stanley Cup. The Brobdingnagian encounter between Maroons and Red Wings last week was the first of a three-out-of-five series between the group leaders. The Red Wings--ablest team in the League on their pre-playoff record, built around a crack forward line (Larry Aurie, Herb Lewis, Marty Barry) which scored no points during the season--won the second game, 3-to-0 and the third, in Detroit, 2-to-1. Meanwhile, the Maple Leafs beat the Bruins, 8-to-6, in a two-game, total-goal series, and the Americans beat the Black Hawks, 7-to-5, on the same basis. Americans and Maple Leafs then started a two-out-of-three series, of which the winner will play the Red Wings. The Maple Leafs won the first game, 3-to-1.

Whoever wins the Stanley Cup this year, major beneficiary of the League's most profitable season will be neither a player nor a manager but a red-faced Chicago grain merchant named James Norris. Mr. Norris owns the Detroit Red Wings, the minor-league Detroit Olympics, and controls the arena in which they play. His interest in hockey, however, is by no means confined to Detroit. He was one of the original syndicate which built the $6,500,000 Chicago Stadium in 1929. Last year he acquired controlling interest in it for a reputed $250,000, thus stands to profit handsomely from the Black Hawks. He also owns a sizable block of stock in Madison Square Garden Corp., which gives him a finger in the pie of the Rangers. Last autumn onetime Bootlegger William V. Dwyer decided to bolster up his feeble Americans, tail-enders in their group since 1929, by buying $35,000 worth of new players. Mr. Norris loaned him the money, got an option to buy the team for $200,000.

Delighted at the success of his stable of hockey teams, Owner Norris, who lives in Lake Forest and summers on Long Island, raises spaniels, plays golf and racquets, rarely drinks and never smokes, last week put a stop to an incipient scandal about "syndicated hockey" by denying that he had any intention of taking up his option on the Americans or buying any more hockey teams.

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