A Positive Identity?

As you may have heard, the Mighty Ducks are a hockey team searching for an identity. They are also a hockey team searching for a uniform no one can mistake for Barney pajamas, and a way to pry the lid off The Pond and add about 17,174 more seats, but, yes, on any list of needs and wants, an identity ranks right up there.

How about this, then?

The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, the hockey team that got Barry Melrose fired.

That was Rogie Vachon’s explanation for last week’s too-little, too-late decision to make Melrose available for roadie duty on Anthony Robbins’ next lecture tour.

If you can’t beat the Ducks, which Melrose hadn’t done since February ‘94, you shouldn’t be coaching the Kings--that was Vachon’s basic point.

“You look at Anaheim, they’re not the Detroit Red Wings,” Vachon said.

“We should be able to handle Anaheim.”

Melrose was 0-4-1 in his last five games against the Ducks. And how did Vachon handle Anaheim Sunday in his first look at the Ducks as Kings interim coach?

Skin-of-the-teeth 2-2 tie at the Forum, by virtue of Marty McSorley’s harried tap-in with 40.8 seconds left in regulation.

The Kings still can’t beat the Ducks, so what do they do now?

Fire Rogie and hire Scotty Bowman?

Bowman qualifies--he always beats the Ducks. There is a reason for that. Bowman coaches the Detroit Red Wings, who, as Vachon aptly noted, are not the Mighty Ducks. Even Mike Sillinger, ex-Wing and current Duck, will give Vachon that.

“Maybe he meant the Red Wings have a lot more talent than anyone else,” Sillinger suggested. “I played with the Red Wings. They have more talent than we do. Any hockey person with eyes can see that.”

Sillinger checked off the roster.

“Fedorov. Yzerman. Coffey. Ciccarelli. They have a lot of big names,” he said.

“Unlike the Ducks.

“We really don’t have any.”

Sillinger proposed that Vachon may have been groping “to find an excuse. I don’t know what that says about our hockey club. They haven’t beaten us this year. What does that say about them?”

It says that while the Ducks may not be the Red Wings, the Kings are not even the Kings any more. Two years ago, with Wayne Gretzky, Luc Robitaille, Tomas Sandstrom, Mike Donnelly, Corey Millen and Alexei Zhitnik strafing the net, the Kings fell three games short of the Stanley Cup. Gretzky is still here, but now he skates with a bunch of guys named Quinn, Druce, Lacroix, Lang and Cowie. Is it a surprise that such a crew can be winless in its last eight games?

The worst thing Melrose did with the Kings was attempt to build them in his own image. During his playing days, Melrose was a thick-legged, thuggish, grinding defenseman with few skills other than sitting menacingly inside the penalty box. But, he was big. Given his own NHL team to play with, Melrose weeded out all the 40-goal-scoring sissies and replaced them with big players, tough players, excruciatingly slow players.

Just like Melrose.

Now Melrose is gone, but the thick-legged, thuggish grinders remain. There are enough of them on the roster to choke a King’s horse, as well as any possible King drive toward the playoffs.

Duck Coach Ron Wilson had it right Sunday when he contended, “We outplayed them for 59 minutes. They are the team with the big payroll and we outplayed them.”

Then, setting his jaw, Wilson promised, “And we’ll come back here next weekend and do the same damn thing.”

The Ducks had a very Red Wingesque second period, when they put 17 shots on net, scored twice and skated figure eights around the Kings. Grant Fuhr, of all people, saved the Kings during that flurry, denying slapshots from Paul Kariya, Todd Krygier and Milos Holan to prevent a 2-1 deficit from ballooning to 5-1.

And at 2-1, all McSorley had to do was poach the net long enough, lift his presumably legal stick high enough and punch one past Guy Hebert to wrest a point out of an otherwise pointless King performance.

Someone threw a question about the Vachon quote at Wilson, and the Duck coach was prepared for it, pouncing.

“Why do they think things like that?” Wilson retorted. “Three teams in our (conference) have fired coaches for the same reason--they can’t figure out how to beat us.

“It’s simple: We play hard. You play hard, you might be able to beat us.”

And there was this from Duck defenseman Bobby Dollas, another former Red Wing:

“What Rogie Vachon says is irrelevant. But I don’t take it as a knock toward us. It may be a shot at the Kings, at what they’ve been going through.

“They can’t beat us. We didn’t beat the Sharks last year, and that’s why we didn’t make the playoffs. But, we didn’t go around firing guys.”

Less than two seasons in and already the Ducks are the paragons of stability within the Southern California hockey market.

So they’re not the Detroit Red Wings.

They’re not the L.A. Kings, either.

Things could be a lot worse.