NHL Playoff Update!!!!!

Actually, not so much.

Just when I want to give hockey the respect it so obviously deserves--the athaletes that play it can not only stand up on those skates but actually skate on them, which, as it turns out, is goddamn hard--something happens. Something to jog the ol' Disrespekternator back to creaky life. Something like the very existence of the Anaheim Ducks, formerly The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.

Look, I have nothing against ducks. Just last Friday I spent an afternoon drinking Galliano with a small flock of Northern Shovelers. (Don't you judge me.)

But I simply can't take seriously any "major" sports franchise that was named, even for a little while, after an Emilio Estevez film. (Unless it was maybe this one.) Can you imagine that happening anywhere else in this country? Or in any other sport? Of course not. Only the NHL thinks enough of its product to tie civic hopes and dreams to the fate of a fucking Disney movie.

L.A. even already had a hockey team, and no one really knows if Anaheim is even real. (Certainly not this guy.) The team only seemed to exist to be named after the movie; a grand and humiliating cross-promotional exercise. The late attempt at blotting the corporate jizz-stain by dropping the "Mighty" was just that. Too late.

Sorry, hockey. Scrub though you might over the years, you'll never remove the Mouse's stain. It's on you like murder on Ray Lewis, women's clothes on Marv Albert, war crimes on the Bush family.