An upside-down view

Brett Hull, one foot in the crease and the other lodged in his mouth, repeatedly called the Ducks “terrible” while they were defeating the Red Wings on Sunday and moving into position to win the Western Conference championship tonight at the Honda Center.

Let’s analyze this.

How is it terrible to pull your goalie for an extra skater late in a game when you have a power play and can create a six-on-four advantage, as Ducks Coach Randy Carlyle did? It’s gutsy and it’s smart. And it worked, when Scott Niedermayer’s goal glanced off Nicklas Lidstrom’s stick and into the net to take the game to overtime.

How is it terrible that Ducks forwards Andy McDonald and Teemu Selanne were alertly forechecking when they pressured Detroit defenseman Andreas Lilja into fumbling the puck in front of his own net, leaving Selanne with a one-on-one against Dominik Hasek?

By Hull’s standards, it must have been an atrocity against hockey that Selanne, with the instincts of a pure scorer, backhanded the puck over a sprawling Hasek for the winner.

It couldn’t be that Hasek should have stayed on his feet, or that Lilja made a bad play or that the Ducks were opportunistic, as any successful team must be. Or that the Red Wings were at fault for not capitalizing on any of seven power plays.

Oh, no.

According to Hull, the scoring whiz turned TV analyst who runs his mouth faster than he ever skated, the Ducks were terrible and the Red Wings will easily win tonight and prevail in a seventh game at Joe Louis Arena -- where the Ducks are 2-1 in this series.

There’s something about the Ducks that seems to blind people to what this team has done.

Maybe it’s the Disney origins of the Ducks’ name. Shortening it from the original Mighty Ducks and changing the logo and colors after Disney sold the team haven’t weakened the association or erased the cartoonish image. The Ducks’ history goes back only to 1993, while the Red Wings have decades of history behind them. But Gordie Howe and Alex Delvecchio aren’t out there wearing the winged wheel now.

The low regard may also stem from ignorance. Too many writers and broadcasters don’t see the Ducks during the season, and it’s easy to disdain what you don’t know.

“People on the East Coast, a lot of them don’t know we exist,” General Manager Brian Burke said. “I’ll talk to a broadcaster or someone about the league trophies, and they’ll say, ‘I only saw one period of your game before I went to sleep.’

“It’s a time zone problem and a distinct lack of respect. There’s no question our group has not gotten the respect it deserves.”

It was typical on Monday that Carlyle was asked if he was surprised that Jean-Sebastien Giguere has been in the shadow of rival goalies throughout the playoffs, even though Giguere’s .935 save percentage is better than Hasek’s.

“It surprises me that you put him there,” Carlyle told reporters. “It’s not us that puts him there. You’re the media; you’re the ones reporting it. That’s what surprises me.”

The Ducks’ toughness, celebrated by Burke, also seems to work against them and become a self-fulfilling prophecy: they led the NHL in penalty minutes this season and haven’t backed down during the playoffs, so they continue to get penalties and be viewed as tough or dirty, which continues the cycle.

They’ve breached the line between rugged and goonish -- that would be you, Chris Pronger -- but the Red Wings aren’t choir boys and many of the calls against both teams have been baffling. It’s still too easy to predict when the referees will swallow their whistles and even things up, even in the “new” NHL.

The Ducks have tempted fate by going to the penalty box too often, but Giguere has been there to save them. Carlyle can beg and plead and lecture his players about becoming disciplined, but it’s ultimately up to them to show restraint. They can do it: during the season they were shorthanded only two more times than the Red Wings were, 410-408.

Carlyle, incidentally, made some curious lineup choices Sunday. He sat defenseman Joe DiPenta and kept Ric Jackman, who had scored a goal in Game 4, played rookie center Ryan Carter for a second consecutive game and scratched Ryan Shannon in favor of rookie Joe Motzko. The results were mixed. Jackman played only 6 minutes 18 seconds, Carter played 4:40, and Motzko played 6:16 and took a holding penalty in the offensive zone with 4:19 left in the third period.

Carlyle has essentially played three lines, confounding the notion that rolling four lines is optimal. His three are better than most teams’ four. Selanne has had two goals and three assists in the last two games. Ryan Getzlaf, the center on the so-called second line, is developing into a franchise player. The line of Travis Moen, Sammy Pahlsson and Rob Niedermayer has had an impact at both ends of the ice.

On defense, Scott Niedermayer has been less than his usual stellar self, fueling speculation that a tender ankle is depleting his ability to push off. But Pronger has been solid outside of his nasty hit on Tomas Holmstrom in Game 3 and Francois Beauchemin has been a steadying force.

“The way we play the game has evolved,” Burke said. “We’re scratching for goals now, while we were a high-scoring machine during the season.”

Their name still invites laughs, but the Ducks are no joke. It’s time Hull and the rest of the hockey world wake up and realize that.

--

Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.