Sport: Hockey

Without fanfare, well aware that it could not steal the spotlight from U. S. football even if its players wore hoop skirts and plumed hats, last week major-league hockey quietly sidled into the North American sport scene at Chicago and Toronto. At Chicago the World-Champion Chicago Blackhawks auspiciously began their five-month defense of the Stanley Cup by trouncing the New York Americans, 6-to-1. At Toronto the powerful Boston Bruins, generally regarded the best team last year despite Chicago’s winning the title, nosed out the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-to-2.

Dyed-in-the-wool hockey fans, who succeeded in finding a few inches of hockey news in their morning papers the past week, discovered the following innovations for the coming season: 1) there are only seven clubs in the National Hockey League (the Montreal Maroons folded); 2) there are no longer two divisions in the league; 3) the team that wins the most games at season’s end will be awarded the National Hockey League championship without more ado, but the “world championship” will be awarded as heretofore to the winner of the post-season Stanley Cup play-offs—a complicated round robin in which six of the seven teams will compete.

Although the best team often fails to win the Stanley Cup, undaunted hockey enthusiasts were nevertheless churning over pre-season prognostications last week. Favorites: the bruising Boston Bruins (with practically the same squad as last year); the French-speaking Montreal Canadiens (fortified by six of last year’s Maroons) ; the lucky Chicago Blackhawks, who finished sixth in the eight-team league last year (converted into championship calibre by the purchase of a complete ready-made forward line from the Maroons) ; and the up-&-coming New York Rangers (whose farm-bred kid team beat the reputable Americans six times in a row during pre-season exhibition games last month).