DOUBLE FEATURE : Kariya and Selanne Should Give Ducks a Dynamic Duo for Years

The hats have rained down on Teemu Selanne twice at the Pond of Anaheim, and he hasn’t been a Mighty Duck for two months.

It was after Selanne’s second three-goal performance last month that Michael Eisner approached him in the Ducks’ dressing room and doffed his own cap.

“It was too far to throw,” Eisner said.

Selanne handed the cap back, asking for an autograph from the Disney chairman, who had just returned from Cap Cities/ABC corporate meetings with dozens of caps--one from each of the newly acquired conglomerate’s businesses.

“I hope that I’m going to have enough,” Eisner said.

There could be quite a run on hats at the Pond over the next handful of years now that the Ducks suddenly have one of the best young scoring tandems in the NHL in Selanne, 25, and Paul Kariya, 21.

Only two other teams have two players among the league’s top 15 scorers, and if Kariya scores three more points over the season’s final five games, the Ducks will have two 100-point scorers on a team that did not have a 25-goal scorer or 60-point scorer in its first two seasons.

Pittsburgh has the league’s dominant three scorers in Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr and Ron Francis, all well over 100 points. Only Jagr, 24, is under 30. Colorado is the Ducks’ only rival for sheer youth, with two 100-point players on the same line in Joe Sakic, 26, and Peter Forsberg, 22, who beat out Kariya as the NHL’s rookie of the year last season.

But the most daunting aspect of the Ducks’ young duo in the eyes of teams such as the Kings that are trying to rebuild with youth is probably this: The three-year-old Anaheim organization has two young players capable of scoring 50 goals in the same season--something that has been done only 25 times.

Wayne Gretzky and Jari Kurri did it four times with Edmonton, which twice had three 50-goal scorers the same season. The Kings’ Marcel Dionne and Charlie Simmer--two-thirds of the Triple Crown line--did it twice, as did Brett Hull and Brendan Shanahan in St. Louis.

It won’t happen in Anaheim this year. Kariya has a shot at 50 goals, with 45 and counting. (Surprisingly, he is still waiting for his first hat trick.) Selanne, who scored 76 as a rookie three seasons ago, has 102 points this season (including three hat tricks) but only 37 goals.

It isn’t much of a stretch, though, to imagine Kariya and Selanne combining for 100 goals. Selanne has two 50-goal seasons in his first four in the NHL, and Kariya is threatening for his first in only his second year in the league.

“They have the potential to be 100-point guys and 50-goal scorers every year,” said General Manager Jack Ferreira, who made the Feb. 7 trade that brought Selanne to the Ducks from the Winnipeg Jets for former first-round picks Oleg Tverdovsky and Chad Kilger.

“That could be a line to reckon with for years,” Duck goaltender Guy Hebert said.

“It’s a great foundation. They’re both superstars,” said Glen Sather, general manager of the Edmonton Oilers and architect of the Gretzky-Kurri-Mark Messier dynasty.

“They’ve got to stay healthy. I don’t think they’re Kurri and Gretzky. They’re their own players. I don’t think anybody will duplicate what those two [Gretzky and Kurri] have done.”

It isn’t likely. But for Kariya, who two months ago was the lone superstar on a developing team, the arrival of Selanne has changed everything.

“Paul was the one offensive weapon we had during the first half of the season. It was pretty much Paul or nobody,” Hebert said. “There were a lot of expectations. But Paul’s a classic athlete in that the pressures put on him from outside the team aren’t as great as the pressures he puts on himself.

“This has helped take the burden off him. He doesn’t have to try to do too much now that he knows we’ve got a guy who scored 76 goals in this league. I think it’s exciting for him to play with another all-star caliber player.”

Kariya said: “I try not to look back, but when the trade happened, it opened up a lot of things for me on the ice. It changed the way I play the game. I can look to pass more, and I don’t have to play such a simple game.”

The reason for that is itself simple.

“He’s got a talented player to play with him,” Coach Ron Wilson said. “He has somebody to finish off the plays he makes now, and someone to set him up too.”

Kariya came to the NHL billed as a playmaker, and Selanne made an incredible goal-scoring debut as a rookie, when he became one of only eight players in NHL history to top 70 goals.

What has emerged, though, is not a collaboration between a setup man and a finisher but a pair of double-threats. Selanne and Kariya both have terrific speed, both can thread a pass through a maze of sticks and legs, and both have quick, accurate shots.

Kariya’s game improved dramatically this season after he developed a quick release that has helped him become more of a goal-scorer. And passing has always been an under-recognized aspect of Selanne’s game.

“He makes unbelievable passes,” said Terry Simpson, Selanne’s coach in Winnipeg. “To me, it almost overshadows his goal-scoring.”

The fortunate player centering Selanne and Kariya’s line is Anatoli Semenov, a skilled veteran playmaker whose style melds nicely with theirs. The player in the middle is going to change, but the burgeoning relationship between Kariya and Selanne figures to be the key to the Ducks’ success.

With that line being checked closely during the Ducks’ last trip, Wilson decided to try to split them up, figuring he could make it harder for the other team by making them watch two lines. But Kariya and Selanne wanted to stay together, and Wilson acquiesced.

The two are roommates on the road, and they feed off each other’s enthusiasm. Kariya, once uncomfortable with the attention he drew, is thriving in the shared spotlight, on and off the ice.

“Teemu’s the type of guy who has a positive effect on everybody. It’s not going to be just Paul,” Ferreira said. “He’s so upbeat and vibrant, it just permeates through the room to everybody.”

Selanne had a productive collaboration with Alexei Zhamnov and Keith Tkachuk in Winnipeg, a relationship he said took about half a season to begin to cement.

“Things are happening faster here,” he said. “Paul and me, we are learning each other faster every day. When we’re in the hotel, we talk a lot about where we want the puck and different things like that. There it was two guys. Now here, it’s one guy mostly.

“For sure, we both are really excited and want to learn and stay together. It’s a really good situation and we want to do well. There’s no limits. Hopefully we’ll become like Jari Kurri and Wayne Gretzky. That sounds awesome.”

The tradition in hockey has been to focus on lines, but with all the roster upheaval today, what really emerges is a history of partnerships.

“You look at the game in the last 10 to 15 years, and it seems like you find tandems, not groups of three,” Kariya said. “It’s Gretzky and Kurri, Lemieux and Kevin Stevens, Adam Oates and Brett Hull. You go through the list and it’s all twos.”

The crucial thing will be staying together.

“I think that’s where you really become good players, when you play for an extended time together,” Kariya said. “We’re playing pretty good hockey right now, but nowhere near where we’d be in three or four years. There’s no thinking anymore then. You just play.”

Selanne and Kariya seem likely to play together in Anaheim for at least the next five years. The NHL has the most limited free agency system of the four major leagues, and players essentially don’t become unrestricted free agents until they reach 32, unless they’re veterans who make less than the league average.

Selanne is signed for four more years, and with one year remaining on Kariya’s first contract, the Ducks would like to negotiate a long-term extension this summer. The catch, though, is that it doesn’t matter whether they do. If he were to complete his contract and receive offers from other teams as a restricted free agent, the Ducks would have the right to keep him by matching the offer.

So it’s not as if this is baseball, basketball or football, sports in which a team can build a young nucleus and quickly lose it to free agency.

“We’re fortunate in that respect,” Ferreira said. “You just keep matching offers. Players at that level, they’re always going to be paid.”

On the other hand, Selanne was traded to the Ducks--proving that being an elite player doesn’t mean you won’t be moved. In his case, Winnipeg management was frustrated by the team’s lack of success despite having three offensive stars in Selanne, Zhamnov and Tkachuk. Selanne’s contract made him the most likely of the three to be traded, and he was dealt.

Might Selanne and Kariya carry the Ducks into the 21st Century?

“I certainly hope so,” Kariya said. “You never know, with the trend to make so many trades. You look, something like one out of every three players in hockey is traded every year. But it’s true, we’re not going to be 32 any time soon.”

CROWNING HONOR: Former King standouts Charlie Simmer, Dave Taylor and Marcel Dionne are impressed by the play of the Mighty Ducks’ Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne. C6