This is an independent fan site about the Quad City Mallards and the hockey market they played in. It is written by people who care about the subject, not by anyone connected to the club.
We are not the Mallards. The franchise that most recently carried the name ceased operations in 2018. This site is not that team, not its successor, not owned or run by anyone who was involved with it, and not an official channel for it or for any league. This domain did once host the club's own official website, which is exactly why we put that sentence near the top: if you arrived here looking for the club, you deserve to know in the first ten seconds what you have actually found.
What we do is the thing fan and archive sites are good at. We explain how the sport below the NHL actually works, we describe the market that supported a team in Moline, and we write about the parts of a minor-league club that outlast its results — the game nights, the promotions, and the community programmes that reach far more people in a town than the roster ever does.
The Mallards, carefully told
What can honestly be said about the club and the building in Moline — and an explicit list of what we will not assert.
The Quad Cities
Five communities, two states, a river running the wrong way, and why this metro keeps supporting professional sport.
How the leagues fit together
NHL, AHL, ECHL and the independent leagues below them. What affiliation buys, and how a player moves.
Why franchises move and fold
Leases, gate dependency and break-even arithmetic, with a calculator you can put your own assumptions into.
Game night
What minor-league hockey is actually like to attend, and why it is the best-value live sport in North America.
The community programmes
Reading schemes, school incentives, junior reporters. The part of a club that reaches a town hardest.
Why a site about a team that no longer exists
Because the interesting thing about a minor-league club was never the standings.
A team like this one is three things stacked on top of each other. It is a sporting operation that does not fully control its own roster, because players are assigned to it by organisations several rungs up. It is a small business that rents a municipal building and lives on what people spend inside it. And it is a civic institution that shows up in schools, in charity nights and in a thousand family photographs.
The first of those is explained badly almost everywhere. The second is explained almost nowhere, and it is the one that decides whether a team is still in your town in five years. The third is the one people actually remember, and it is the first thing to disappear from the record when a club stops operating.
What we are careful about
Minor-league hockey history is patchily documented. Nicknames get licensed, revived and reused; franchises are assets that move between cities and between leagues; the same building appears under three different sponsor names in three sources describing the same decade. A great deal of what circulates online about clubs at this level is confidently wrong.
So this site describes patterns where it cannot verify specifics. You will not find a trophy list, a season-by-season table, a roster or an attendance figure here, because we would be guessing. What you will find on the history page is a plain statement of what we decline to claim, and an open invitation to send us documentation that would let us say more.
If you have programmes, yearbooks, ticket stubs, photographs or clippings, we would genuinely like to see them.