PRIME NUMBER
Seven games right length for a series
SOMEHOW, the people who invented and designed our favorite sports seemed to get just about everything right. In baseball, 90 feet between the basepaths is perfect geometry. In hoops, it is impossible to even conjure a 17-foot free throw, or a 13-footer; 15 is just right. Football fields were supposed to be 100 yards long (sorry, Canada).
Sometimes, some tweaking has been necessary. A man named Danny Biasone, owner of the Syracuse Nationals, invented the shot clock to make basketball watchable. The forward pass, as Knute Rockne proved a century ago, was a good idea, as it turns out. Eliminating two-line-pass offsides has been a key hockey alteration.
It’s hard to argue with any of it. Much of it is perfect.
Seven is perfect, as in best-ofseven playoff series, as in the absolute perfect formula for determining who should advance and who should go home and, sometimes, who should schedule a parade for two days from now.
Now, you might not agree with this perfection Sunday morning and afternoon if your hockey proclivities favor the Rangers, who will face the Penguins in Game 7 of their Eastern Conference firstround series at Madison Square Garden. You will start pacing at brunch. You will start to call and text your fellow Rangers fans not long after. You will stress-eat and sweat and chew your fingernails to the quick.
Game 7 does that to you. Look, the Rangers have already survived two elimination games and lived to tell about both, even after spotting Pittsburgh two early goals in each. But that was different. That was desperation, and survival. Now, a win vaults the Rangers into the conference semifinals. Now there is something to gain, and something to lose, in equal measure. And whoever wins, across seven games, that’s a fair arbiter of who should win.
We can thank baseball for showing us the way with this. The first World Series in 1903 was a best-ofnine, before it opted for best-ofseven beginning in 1905. But by 1919 the game had grown so wildly popular, the owners figured more is better. In 1919-21 it returned to best-of nine. The karmic sporting gods voiced their loud displeasure by introducing the Black Sox scandal, which very nearly murdered the sport.
By 1922, it was back to best-ofseven, and there it has stayed.
Sometimes, sheer logistics necessitates a “short series.” Baseball used the one-game play-in for wildcard teams (and now will go twoout-of-three), then a best-of-five in the Division Series before heading back to best-of-seven in the LCS and World Series. There have been times when both the NHL and the NBA had five-game series in the first round of the playoffs.
Go back even further and you stumble across the regrettable “mini-series”: best two-of-three. The National League used that format four different times to settle first-place ties, and that makes sense. But in basketball and hockey, what the mini-series did was introduce an unwanted fluke scenario to the proceedings.
(Rangers fans of a certain vintage can no doubt recite chapter and verse of the 1975 mini-series with the Islanders, which essentially gave birth to the Islanders as a legit franchise as well as one of the most heated rivalries in the sport.)
This is different. This is better. This is perfect. This is Game 7, finale of a best-of-seven, and if the Penguins may have preferred that this be a best-of-five (since they’d be easing into the next round already, and Sidney Crosby’s ears wouldn’t be ringing) … well, this isn’t 1983 anymore. You have to win four out of seven.
And now, you only need one out of one.
Though, as far as Pittsburgh and New York are concerned (all due respect to the Islanders, they belong to the 516), this is also the final game of one of those infernal miniseries. In 2014 the Rangers beat the Penguins in a 2-1 thriller in Game 7 after recovering from a 3-1 deficit. And the only other time the cities have met in a Game 7? The 1960 World Series. Bill Mazeroski.
And there you have all the beauty of Game 7. Agony. Ecstasy. In equal measure.