Lord Stanley rules

Checked in on the NBA playoffs this a.m., and it was same-old, same-old. The Sixers won, the Spurs won, and the Warriors, ho-hum, smoked somebody or other in Game Whatever of some first-round series. That is what the Warriors do, after all.

Six months or a decade or an eon from now, when the playoffs finally wrap up, they'll be bench-pressing the Big Trophy again. You can make out the deposit slip for that right now.

Know what's way better, including the NBA's trophy?

Lord Stanley's Cup. And Lord Stanley's playoffs.

This is because filling out a Stanley Cup Playoff bracket is even dumber than filling out an NCAA Tournament bracket, and that's because the Stanley Cup playoffs are so mercilessly impossible to predict. I mean, did you see what happened the other night?

What happened was the Columbus Blue Jackets whupped the Tampa Bay Lightning 7-3 in a first-round playoff game.

Oh, but there's more.

The 7-3 victory was not only a thumper in itself, see, it finished a four-game sweep of the Lightning for the Blue Jackets. And that's a thumper because the Lightning won an NHL-record 62 games in the regular season, while the Jackets -- who came home eighth in the East -- finished 30 points and 15 wins behind the Lightning.

In other words, they did to the Lightning what the Lightning was supposed to do to them, as befits a 1-seed playing an 8-seed.

Nowhere else in sports do you get this sort of lunacy, because nowhere else but hockey is there such a disparity between what wins for you in the regular season and what wins for you in the playoffs. A goaltender suddenly seeing pucks like they were beach balls can turn a seven-game series all by himself; a team of grinders who skate their wings and seal off angles in their own zone can upend a team of flyers in that same seven-game series.

Or to perhaps generalize it too much: Gaudy snipers own the regular season, but it's the blue-collar grunts who in some form or fashion dictate the playoffs.

And just as often make the Stanley Cup playoffs so wonderfully unpredictable, and the best of all playoffs.