The following story appeared in the January 31st issue of Puq Magazine.

It’s an age-old question about age-old players — how long after their play begins to decline does their team have an obligation to keep paying them for their services?

For the Anaheim Ducks, it’s a question that has never even crossed the minds of management when Teemu Selanne is the subject of conversation.

Over the past six years, Selanne has consistently proven that age ain’t nothin’ but a number to him. Transmogrifying like the NHL’s very own version of Benjamin Button, he is still producing at a point-per-game pace. At 41, most players are looking retirement in their rearview mirrors. Selanne, however, has abstained and in doing so continued his assault on the record books.

As with every off-season since the 2005 lockout, the Ducks were again forced to play a game of Schrodinger’s Selanne — contemplate their future with and without him — last summer. But true to form, Teemu decided to extend his farewell tour because he still felt as though he had something left to give. Additionally, the Ducks’ opening weekend schedule included a game in Finland, and a homecoming visit would be the perfect start to the season.

Unfortunately for the Ducks, things didn’t go so well to start the year. Facing some perplexing issues regarding its goaltending and stars not playing up to their salaries, the team became mired in a slump that cost head coach Randy Carlyle his job.

One player who did not share the team’s woes? Selanne, of course. Through the tribulations, he was able to put up an average of a point per game, proving to all that while the team appeared ready to pack it in, he would not quit.

Frankly, it was an embarrassment to the fans that their favorite team, was not, by and large, putting in an honest day’s work while the elder statesman of the franchise was left to shoulder the load alone.

But that all changed very abruptly when the calendar flipped from 2011 to 2012. A most amazing thing happened, something that many could not have foreseen as the catalyst to a reversal of the team’s fortunes: Jason Blake returned to the lineup. It’s not that Blake’s return in and of itself was the harbinger of change for the Ducks, but it certainly set into motion a chain of causality that has the team thinking it might have an outside shot at the playoffs — a thought that was all but statistically impossible a few weeks ago.

Instead of reuniting Blake with Selanne, head coach Bruce Boudreau slotted the former onto the third line alongside speedster Andrew Cogliano and rookie Nick Bonino. That left Selanne lining up next to fellow Finns Niklas Hagman and Saku Koivu. It was a combination that had strangely not been explored more than superficially since the Ducks completed their Finnish triumvirate by acquiring Hagman in the fall.

Suddenly, everything clicked.

Although it’s hard to draw any explicit connection between the new lineup combinations and the concurrent surge in Jonas Hiller’s play, there is no doubt that their coincidental timing has been key to the Ducks’ newfound success.

The chemistry Selanne discovered playing alongside Koivu and Hagman is uncanny, and it mirrors the resurgence of the bottom-six forwards. For the first time in recent memory, the Ducks have reasonably competent third and fourth lines, even if they’re collectively a little less stout than their previous incarnations.

Despite the renewed optimism in Anaheim, it seems like the 2012 playoffs are still nothing more than a dream at this point. Given the circumstances, the next question that must be asked is, “With all the promise the Ducks have been demonstrating of late, would Selanne consider coming back for another year?”

It’s hard to speculate about his motivations or what might tip the scales in favor of those who hope to see him take another victory lap, but it’s likely the same thought will be crossing everybody’s mind at the conclusion of this campaign.

One more year? Bring it on.

What’s in this great issue? Without spoiling too much, we cover the Winter Classic, the World Junior Hockey Championship, the Ducks’ recent turnaround and there’s even a handy February calendar marked with the schedule and a few other important Ducks dates.

Hope you all read it and enjoy it. Thanks for being such a great community.

Playoffs? Don’t talk about ­— playoffs?! You kidding me?! Playoffs?!

In so many words: yes, with a couple of caveats.

By now, most sports fans are familiar with that particular rant, unleashed by football coach Jim E. Mora when asked about his team’s chances of making the playoffs. We have not to-date  — unfortunately — seen Bruce Boudreau go on a similar tirade, but perhaps that’s for want of the appropriate question. More likely, it’s because we fans have simply refused to acknowledge the thought ever since the Ducks hit rock-bottom around Christmas.

That was just fine by me, by the way. Numbing myself to the idea of the Ducks sliding out of the playoff picture helped deal with the reality and had me looking forward to a lottery pick in what’s expected to be a deep draft this June.

Then the team had to go and start winning. And winning. Before you know it, I started seeing talk of a playoff berth creep into the discourse surrounding the team, and I am sad to report that I got sucked in. Not that I ever really believed it.

Until now, that is.

Now I have to face the reality that my favorite team might qualify for the playoffs. The horror.

Before you rush to console me — or if you’re a Sharks fan, savor my bitter tears — consider this: my team almost matched its win total from the first three months of the season in the past three weeks alone.

Now the Ducks are in a tenuous position. They are close enough to contention that a few more wins will have them in the mix for a playoff berth. However, they are also precipitously close to the edge of the abyss, and another slide will eliminate them with extreme prejudice. It is in this purgatory where my greatest fears lie.

My primary concern is for the integrity of the team’s roster. Although far from perfect, the extant lineup has finally found some chemistry and it’s hard to fathom any transaction that could objectively improve it.

If Bob Murray is trigger-happy around the trade deadline, he had better be prepared to accept only overpayments and not push the panic button in a vain attempt to salvage this season.

To that end, it is better that the team should fall out of contention quickly so Murray will not be tempted to make any moves with undue haste.

Another concern I have is with the future of the organization. As much as it has hurt to watch my favorite team crash and burn this season, the silver lining was always the knowledge that the 2012 draft was expected to bear exceptional talents to the teams choosing near the top of the heap.

I would never publicly accede to my satisfaction regarding the team’s failures, but drafting a Nail Yakupov-like player is not an opportunity often afforded to teams like the Ducks. True, there is not much honor in tanking, but if the playoffs are a statistical impossibility, why not make the most of it?

The likely scenario is that the Ducks continue to play up to their talent until the end of the season and finish out of the playoffs, but above the Western Conference basement. If that’s the case, I’ll have to console myself with the fact that for every Mario Lemieux that rewards a tanking team, there is an Alexandre Daigle waiting to be chosen and even the karmic score.

It’s no shock for Ducks fans to hear about their team’s subpar goaltending this season — subpar play all around, really. Happily, things have been looking up of late. The team is on a roll and maligned goaltender Jonas Hiller has finally begun to play like the all-star he used to be. Has it been enough to wash away the early season disappointment? You be the judge:

Click to enlarge.

As the owner of a blog dedicated primarily to one particular topic (i.e. Anaheim Ducks hockey), it is incumbent upon me not to editorialize on too many issues beyond the purview of our normal coverage. One reason for that is to avoid diluting our product and see it reduced to just another unfocused site in a sea of billions. The other, more important reason is to avoid alienating readers who may not share those opinions. On matters of professional sport, spirited debate is expected and even welcomed. On issues of politics, however, it can be a real minefield, and sites like ours are wise to leave its navigation to the experts.

Today, I am here to tell you the debate surrounding internet freedom is one issue about which I will not be silent.

Two bills are currently making their way through various levels of the United States government, each with the purported aim of thwarting internet “piracy” (I use quotes because it’s actually copyright infringement — might as well call a spade a spade). SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA, or the PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) Act, both promise to protect the work of American rightsholders from the threat of foreign thievery. Far be it from me to question the true motivation behind the bills or the $94 million the entertainment industry paid to have them drafted, but suffice it to say that the ambiguity in the language within them is enough to not only stifle innovation in the technology sector — one of the few growth industries in a still-reeling American economy — but also leave innumerable innocent bystanders upended in its wake. Ironically, they will ultimately fail at the very tasks they have set out to accomplish.

Indeed, it would be a slippery slope if the entertainment industry had the ability to bend the letter and spirit of the law to their liking. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA, as it’s commonly referred to), although itself not a good piece of legislation and still frequently abused by the industry, still contains an invaluable safe-harbor provision that protects sites from liability if its users are engaging in infringing activity, so long as they comply with takedown requests. SOPA, on the other hand, makes no pretensions of allowing for due process and could theoretically allow a plaintiff to effectively remove a defendant’s entire web site from the internet before the latter has a change to even examine the charges that have been levied.

Reddit sysadmin Jason Harvey has posted a technical analysis on the bills and why their provisions are both insufficient and too broad in scope.

SOPA and PROTECT IP contain no provisions to actually remove copyrighted content, but rather focus on the censorship of links to entire domains.

If the Attorney General served reddit with an order to remove links to a domain, we would be required to scrub every post and comment on the site containing the domain and censor the links out, even if the specific link contained no infringing content. We would also need to implement a system to automatically censor the domain from any future posts or comments. This places a measurable burden upon the site’s technical infrastructure. It also damages one of the most important tenets of reddit, and the internet as a whole – free and open discussion about whatever the fuck you want.

Numerous websites across the internet — notably Wikipedia and reddit — have gone dark today in protest. The terrifying reality is that if a bill like SOPA gets passed into law, its ambiguous language could allow malevolent parties to abuse its powers and ultimately force such pages offline and their owners out of business.

I am not an American. I do not profess to be on the frontline should this bill pass and start wreaking havoc as it appears destined to do. It would be naive, however, to suggest that as a Canadian the ripple effect would not reach my country very quickly. Many major players on the web are vulnerable to this legislation. Sites that rely on user-generated content are especially at-risk: Twitter and Facebook come to mind, and both have been very public in their opposition to SOPA, specifically. Google, as a link aggregator, could be held liable if an offending link appears in its search results. What does Lamar Smith (SOPA is his brainchild) propose to do in such a scenario? Take Google offline? Even if it were able to successfully delist offending links immediately, the whack-a-mole principle is always in play on the internet: take one site down and ten more will spring forth to replace it forthwith. An unintended, although not as hotly discussed, consequence could be that these American companies (all of which serve a global market) take their business to another country with less tyrannical laws regarding online content. Such moves could irreparably damage the American economy and send the country back on a downward spiral toward a full-blown recession. Admittedly that’s a little bit of a leap in logic, but if your company was forced to decide between bankrupting itself to abide by the law (or shutting down its business entirely if its model can’t be “fixed”) and moving, the ones with enough money will choose the second option.

Moreover, Quacked is a site that, while based on almost entirely original content, also employs limited, editorial use of copyrighted materials (the pictures you see atop every article). Granted that’s always been right on the line of fair use, but to-date I have not received a single takedown request or cease-and-desist order. SOPA or PROTECT IP would both grant an accuser (e.g. Getty Images) privilege to file a complaint with our web host, who would then be bound to remove our site because it’s easier and quicker than trying to work out the differences if there is a threat of litigation hanging over the situation. One complaint over a single image on this blog could bring the entire domain offline before I would get my day in court, not that it would likely arrive because we do not have a team of lawyers to fight such battles.

Mind you, all of this is being wrapped in the American flag and being presented as a measure of security against “foreigners” who seek only to profit off the hard work of upstanding American citizens — or at least the ones who make enough money to influence federal policy. To say nothing of the fact that the U.S. government is funding the development of tools to help the residents in other countries living under “repressive regimes” circumvent such measures, passing these bills into law would rank among the highest of hypocrisy offenses and obviate any discussion of the United States occupying any sort of moral high ground. After all, why worry about censorship in other countries when your primary focus is on stopping the scourge of copyright infringement through the same types of tactics in your own backyard?

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. This fight, while important, will not be the last. It is imperative that we do not take what we have for granted; if we do, we risk losing the last bastion of truly free speech. Our rights and freedoms will take a back seat to the interests of corporations that have not been able to develop a cogent business model necessary to survive in the digital age.

That simply cannot be allowed to happen.

When a player scores 50 goals and becomes the NHL MVP, you tend to forget there was a time when he was, in fact, pretty green (and purple — check out those threads!).

It was a scant six or so years back that Corey Perry, wearing a decidedly more conspicuous number 61, made his auspicious debut on an NHL scoresheet, potting a goal for the then-Mighty Ducks against the Edmonton Oilers. Demonstrating a nose for the net that has stood him in good stead with the team and its fans ever since, Perry pounced on a loose puck in the Oilers’ crease to tally his first marker.

As Perry breaks down the play, the words from the original broadcast seem to echo like a prescient refrain:

As goaltenders around this league are going to discover soon, if you gotta give it to somebody on the doorstep, you might not want to give it to Corey Perry.

Perry’s is just one in a series of videos on NHL.com that features players describing their first NHL goal. Also featured are Brad Richards, Logan Couture and Shane Doan.

Holy hangover, Batman! We’re back after ringing in the new year, even if our favorite Orange County team appears to still be feeling the effects of the late-night champagne celebrations.

Right on schedule, 2012′s first big NHL headline is commensurate in both controversy and surprise: the NHLPA has effectively vetoed the NHL’s proposed — and Board of Governors-approved  — plan to institute sweeping changes to the alignment of its teams.

There are several potential reasons why new NHLPA head Donald Fehr chose to mark his as-yet-brief tenure so boldly, but it appears the major sticking point was the NHL’s unilateral development of the restructuring. Greg Wyshynski of Puck Daddy has a few theories about why the NHLPA felt the chasm in opinion was simply too big to bridge.

The unbalanced conference format, with two divisions of eight teams and two divisions of seven teams. Combined with the return to a four-team “divisional” playoff format, the players felt there was an unfair advantage to teams in the smaller conferences.

For its part, the league feels that the players’ association is overstepping its bounds and in doing so has brought ruin to its carefully crafted scheme. Deputy commissioner Bill Daly weighs in:

“It is unfortunate that the NHLPA has unreasonably refused to approve a Plan that an overwhelming majority of our Clubs voted to support, and that has received such widespread support from our fans and other members of the hockey community, including Players[...]”

“We believe the Union acted unreasonably in violation of the League’s rights.  We intend to evaluate all of our available legal options and to pursue adequate remedies, as appropriate.”

As this story develops, we will no doubt hear from all sides involved, including the teams who stood to benefit from a revised travel schedule.

What this means for the future of divisional alignment in the NHL or the looming labor negotiations between the league and players’ association is unclear, but the sense of foreboding is strong.

Good thing we pushed that feature on realignment out the door before 2011 concluded, isn’t it?

When the puck drops tonight between the Ducks and Colorado Avalanche, it will mark a very special homecoming for one of the Avs’ players: former Anaheim goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere.

For the first time since being dealt to the Toronto Maple Leafs almost two years ago, Giguere will be stepping on the ice at the Honda Center in a visiting team’s uniform. Having spent the better part of nine years with the organization, he left behind a legacy as a hard worker, great teammate and friendly face in the community.

Eric Stephens of the O.C. Register has put together a nice feature in anticipation of tonight’s game. In it, Giguere talks about his return to form after off-season sports hernia surgery, his role as a mentor and his expectations for the video tribute the team has prepared.

Corey Perry remembers the moment when he and Getzlaf were the first to mob a joyous Giguere when the Ducks captured the Cup with a 6-2 Game 5 victory over Ottawa. Perry said Giguere has a permanent place in franchise lore that should be noted.

“You look at what kind of person he is,” Perry said. “He’s a guy that everybody loved in this organization. All the fans love him.”

Meanwhile, NHL.com has interviews with both Teemu Selanne and Giguere, and it seems that the importance of the occasion is not lost on either of them. Selanne, himself a Ducks legend, speaks with reverence about Giguere’s accomplishments during the latter’s time in Anaheim — a fitting tribute to perhaps the only other player who occupies the same stratosphere in the team’s history.

This story was originally published in the December 23 issue of Devil’s Advocate.

Doomsday is upon us all. Or maybe not. It depends on who you ask. For the first time in almost two decades, the NHL is restructuring its teams in an effort to placate the masses (which in this case means the networks, the players, the owners, the fans and just about anybody else who invests time or money in the sport).

It’s a little axiomatic to say any decision that aims to please everybody ends up pleasing nobody, but it rings especially true when it comes to a hot topic like scheduling in professional sports leagues. Invariably, some teams, comfortable in their current situation, will be resistant to the idea of change, while others will welcome it with open arms.

In this case, it’s the teams in the Western Conference cast as the malcontents. Although gripes abounded, chief among them was the issue of travel time. Whereas teams in the Eastern Conference currently have just a single timezone to deal with during intraconference games (Winnipeg excepted), teams from the west have to travel among up to four just to play teams in the same conference.

Under the current format, teams like Columbus and Detroit have legitimate grievances: playing in the Western Conference, the Blue Jackets and Red Wings are the only teams to play home games in the eastern time zone. [Ed. note: Officially, it was the Minnesota Wild, the Dallas Stars and the Blue Jackets on record as being displeased with crossing time zones so often.] The bulk of their schedules comprise matchups with teams situated westerly, which practically guarantees extended periods of travel on every road trip. A team in the Eastern Conference (again, not counting the Winnipeg Thrashers) playing other conference teams never has to leave the comfort of its own time zone. After the rigors of an 82 game schedule, it’s not hard to surmise how the debate’s friction came about.

The new divisional (or is that conference-al?) alignment aims to rectify the travel issues facing Western Conference teams by abolishing the six existing divisions and reformatting them into four new divis— er, conferences. The NHL was apparently hoping fans’ memories are short enough to have already forgotten the last time the league’s teams were arranged into four groups (1993), because back then they were called — wait for it — divisions.

Here are the four new conferences:

Click to enlarge.

These as-yet-unnamed conferences restore some equilibrium to the distribution of time zones, although there are still some daunting travels in familiar regions — Edmonton to Los Angeles is not exactly a commuter flight, no matter what Wayne Gretzky says.

The purpose of all the rearrangement is ostensibly to address the aforementioned travel concerns while also looking to improve the visibility of every team in every city. All out-of-conference games for teams are now split evenly into home and away dates, which will ensure that fans in every arena see all 29 other teams at least once a season. The potential benefits garnered by guaranteeing that teams in every market will get to see superstars like Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin will no doubt appeal to owners, especially ones whose teams may not sell to capacity every night.

(PHOTO: Jeff Gross/Getty Images)

Teams will play games against other teams in their own conference five or six times a year, depending on the size of their conference and the opponent in question.

Here is the official explanation that was included in the league’s press release:

In the seven-team Conferences, teams would play six times — three home, three away — for a total of 36 inter-division games. In the eight-team Conferences, teams would play either five or six times in a season on a rotating basis — for a total of 38 inter-division games.

The teams in the seven-team Conferences will have 46 out-of-conference games, including 23 at home and 23 on the road. The teams in the eight-team Conferences will have 44 out-of-conference games evenly split between home and away.

Are you thoroughly confused yet? Well, stick with this, because it gets even more complicated.

The new playoff format is itself relatively simple. The top four teams in each conference will qualify: the first-place team will play the fourth-place team and the second-place team will play the third-place team. The winners will then face each other for the right to represent their conference in the final four. How the matchups between those teams is determined has not yet been decided.

Where it gets tricky is in the semantics between conference sizes. In the smaller conferences (C and D), four of seven teams will qualify for postseason play, giving each team an objective statistical probability of 57.14% that they will see playoff action. That is up almost 3 percentage points (not 3% as some are reporting, it’s actually more than 7%) from the curent format. Comparatively, the odds in the eight-team conferences (A and B), the probability drops more than 3 percentage points (or about 6.7%) to even odds (50%).

(PHOTO: Jeff Gross/Getty Images)

That’s bad news for teams like Anaheim that are already in fierce competition for playoff spots when April rolls around. Teams in “Conference B” will also be fighting tooth and nail for playoff berths, with a handful of young up-and-coming teams to challenge the perennial favorites.

In C and D (née Eastern), very little has changed as the Northeast and Atlantic teams remain together, while the Southeast gets split between them. Playoff races should feature familiar foes, even if they’re slightly less intense than in the other two conferences.

Implications beyond the schedule have thus far been left to fan inference. In Anaheim, fans have been pondering the possibilities and it looks like there could be new issues rising from the ashes of the ones that get solved.

First, consider the implications of the reduction in out-of-conference games. It’s great for Ducks fans that their team will play rivals San Jose and Los Angeles up to six times a season (the current schedule calls for six games against intradivisional opponents). And getting to play Edmonton and Vancouver an extra two times? Bring it on! But what of non-regional rivals like Detroit? Suddenly Anaheim has its annual meetings with the Wings cut in half permanently — or until the next major scheduling overhaul, at least. Those games, which represent rivalries that developed under the old format, have been shuttered to make allowances for every team to visit every other team at least once.

Is it a fair trade-off? The owners might be happy to see all 30 teams in their arenas each year, but until new rivalries are fostered, the additional travel time that such a move necessitates might be seen as a nuisance.

(PHOTO: Jeff Gross/Getty Images)

It also removes any mystery when two teams finally meet in the Stanley Cup Final. To find he best example of how futzing with the schedule can cause that very type of collateral damage, one need not look any further than Major League Baseball. Interleague play has all but wiped out the mystique of the World Series matchup when teams from the American League used to take on a National League opponent for the first time all season.

Granted, there are some nuances that make the NHL’s situation a little different — there are no separate sets of rules governing each conference akin to the designated hitter in baseball — and playing more often could hypothetically foster rivalries where none existed before, but going from a single game a year to two against a team like Carolina will not make the Hurricanes the Ducks’ sworn enemies in the playoffs.

All is not lost, though. For starters, the league has not decided how the final four teams will be seeded, so there still exists the potential to see teams from the old east/west format who would never have played for the Stanley Cup now do so. The rivalries that survive after this season could intensify under the pressure of a playoff series. Wouldn’t it be great to see a New York Rangers and Philadelphia Flyers final? How about the Ducks and Red Wings for all the marbles? It could happen, pending a decision by the board of governors.

Even better, the reintroduction of divisional-style playoffs in the first two rounds should result in a dramatic uptake of interest among fans. To date, the Ducks and Kings have never met in a playoff series. If both teams make the 2013 playoffs, however, their meeting would be virtually inexorable.

(PHOTO: Jeff Gross/Getty Images)

Teams like the Ducks could also see increased exposure to the east coast media. Whether or not that’s ultimately to the team’s benefit remains to be seen, but any additional awareness could have a trickle-down effect on the team’s bottom line. The league’s smaller market teams, bound as they are by self-imposed budgets, could see an increase in gate revenues thanks to the wider variety of teams coming to play at their venues.

Like any seismic shift in the hockey landscape that portends upset among the sport’s purists — shootouts being an obvious recent example — realignment could threaten the very fabric of the league’s existence if the doomsayers are to be believed. More likely, it will bring with it many of the benefits promised to the teams pressing for changes now, with some side-effects that are endemic to any monumental change to an established order.

And what of our Ducks? The usual suspects all remain within striking distance, promising to incubate and foster hostilities within the state of California — nothing new on that front. Whether or not seeing more of the east coast will be a boon or a bust remains to be seen. We’ll take a pass on making a more definitive judgment until the new playoff structure is formalized.

Now is it too much to ask for the Adams, Norris, Patrick and Smythe divisions — I mean, conferences — back?

Direct from the latest issue of Devil’s Advocate, our latest (albeit very brief) discussion of issues surrounding the Ducks: the new coach, the new Finn and the new year.

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