Dean Juipe: NBA, NHL hierarchies in disarray

Monday, April 7, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

MAYBE ORDER will be restored at the turn of the millennium.

World Order? No, that's too great an undertaking.

How about just order within the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League standings, where once-dominant franchises like the Boston Celtics, Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs are now languishing at or near the bottom of their respective leagues.

Call this a lament of sorts, but the world was a better place when the Celtics ruled the NBA and the Canadiens almost habitually went home with the Stanley Cup.

With the millennium supposedly comes a day of reckoning, and maybe then these new spend-freely franchises that have driven the Celts, the Habs and the Leafs downward will get their comeuppance.

As it stands, it's a perplexing sight with an inept basketball team in Boston, a less-than-mediocre hockey team in Montreal and an abysmal one in Toronto.

There was a time when those teams won championships so regularly that in some fans' eyes they were reviled. Other fans, kinder and gentler in a George Bush sort of way, at least begrudgingly accepted the belief that Boston, Montreal and Toronto had somehow been preordained to lead charmed lives as perpetual contenders/champions.

There was a mystical quality to seasons in which the Celtics, Canadiens and Maple Leafs ruled. These were good teams that were also lucky.

Somewhere, things went awry.

The Celtics, 13-63 and losers of nine straight games after falling to the Washington Bullets on Sunday, have won 24 division titles, 19 conference championships and 16 NBA crowns. From 1956-57 through 1968-69, they finished on top every year but two. Later, after retooling with Larry Bird, they added five more championships.

Now they're so bad that Bird, currently a "special assistant" for the Celts, isn't sure he wants to coach them even though he has expressed an interest in becoming an NBA head coach. The Celtics are immersed in confusion.

Life is almost as dismal for those who follow the Canadiens and Leafs, which is nine-tenths of Canada.

Between them, Montreal (23) and Toronto (11) have won the Stanley Cup 34 times. Yet today the Canadiens are 29-35-14 and will require a strong finish to make the NHL's 16-team playoffs, while the Leafs are 29-42-8 and have already turned their immediate thoughts to a summer of playing golf.

This is not the way the sports world was meant to be. It's not the way things were in the 1950s and '60s, when basketball and hockey seasons annually unfolded in a neat, orderly and predictable way, culminating in still another victory parade through the downtowns of these cold, Eastern cities.

Now the good times, the championships, the money and the parades have gone South and West.

It's as if a comet or a spaceship, or a spaceship camouflaged by a comet, passed by and upset the natural order of things.