Headscratchers / The Mighty Ducks

• In D3 the snooty Eden Hall didn't want the Ducks there. But that doesn't make any sense. The Ducks are world champions. No matter how much they were looked down on because of their "commoner" upbringing, there's no way that any school that valued their hokey cred like Eden Hall would turn away or try to oust a world championship team.
  • At least in the captain's case, his younger brother was all set to join Eden Hall's hockey program until the school decided to give all the Ducks scholarships and take all the spots on the JV squad. He was pissed that the school took the opportunity away from him.
  • Given how unimpressed they seem at their game they might think the Junior Goodwill Games win was a fluke, especially since the Ducks don't do all that well at first.

• Hans is specifically stated to be Scandinavian (most likely Norwegian), so how does it make any bit of sense that his brother Jan has a German accent and cooks German food? Not that someone from Norway can’t like German food, but it’s presented as the food from Jan’s home country. Germany and Scandinavia are not that geographically close and have different cultures.

• In the first game vs. Iceland in D2, both Portman and Gaffney get kicked out of the game for "intent to injure" because they...pushed an opponent down. Yet when an Iceland player deliberately slashes Banks' wrist with his stick in full view of the entire arena, he gets sent to the penalty box. How was he not kicked out of the entire tournament??
  • Portman was ejected for knocking the referee down specifically — it was an accident, but Portman's reputation to this point isn't going to do him any favors. Gaffney meanwhile probably did intend to injure those Iceland players who were hassling her for being a girl, though I personally think she was playing the long game here as the game was already out of hand when Goldberg was initially pulled. The player who slashed Banks' wrist after the goal should have been ejected and probably charged in criminal court for assault, but I think here it's Fiction Isn't Fair for the sake of showing how wrong everything's gone for Team USA.
  • The Refs ALWAYS make things as difficult as possible for the Ducks. It's just a dramatic thing in the films. In D3 they ignore all of Varsity's cheap shots while giving the Ducks several penalties.

• What was stopping Eden Hall from just adding another hockey team? If they had players already at the school who were good enough to play, there’s no reason they couldn’t just have a third team. There wouldn’t be any shortage of teams to play, and there certainly is no shortage of talent at the school. It would have quelled most of the resentment toward the Ducks.
  • League rules forbidding more than one team per institution per level of play (varsity, JV, and presumably a JJV that no one is going to be satisfied with and will be very unlikely to actually see play because what other school can field that many teams?), as well as a hard cap on the total number of scholarships a school can offer. The Warriors' beef is that the Ducks took away scholarships that their younger siblings would have otherwise gotten because Eden Hall cannot offer more scholarships to all even if they had the money to do so.
    • They could have had one or two teams in another league. My high school had four soccer teams of each gender. Two of each were varsity teams and played other varsity team, but did so in different leagues. Then we had a JV and a freshmen team for each gender as well in different leagues. If Eden Hall wanted to make it work, they could easily have done so.

• What school would allow 14 year old boys and girls to share a locker room and showers?!
  • Female players are so rare here (the only team to have any female players other than the Duck are the Trinidad-Tobago team who had one female player shown on the bench) they might just not have the justification or motivation to make a second locker room for females and tell everyone to just behave.
  • It calls into question one of the glaring issues of the entire series, particularly in a high school setting: Where is the girl’s hockey team? And even if Eden Hall doesn’t have a girl’s hockey team for Connie and Julie to play on, they have to have SOME girl’s sports teams (Title IX guarantees that). Ergo, they must have a women’s locker room. Maybe you’re thinking that the teams would just use the same locker room at separate times? Leaving aside the logistical nightmare that would present, Eden Hall is a sports powerhouse. They would absolutely overspend on their athletic facilities.

• In D1, Gordon tries to pass off coaching duties to Jessie and Terry's dad after the team loses faith in him. But isn't he forgetting that he's been ordered to coach the team by a judge? He has zero say in the matter, and could face prison time (and being a lawyer, maybe disbarment) by violating the judge's orders.
  • The exact orders were 500 hours of community service, and Bombay could argue that at that point his continued presence specifically as coach of the Ducks would not be a service to the kids and would like to serve the remaining hours in another fashion.