Sielski: Giroux is whatever you want him to be
Claude Giroux's career with the Flyers is a kaleidoscope. Hold it up. Turn it. Change the angle at which you view it. You can see whatever you want. The excellence and the disappointments and the legitimate reasons and the empty excuses collide and meld into a player who is hard to pigeonhole, whose truest value is hard to quantify.
Claude Giroux's career with the Flyers is a kaleidoscope. Hold it up. Turn it. Change the angle at which you view it. You can see whatever you want. The excellence and the disappointments and the legitimate reasons and the empty excuses collide and meld into a player who is hard to pigeonhole, whose truest value is hard to quantify.
Is he a centerpiece forward, one of the NHL's best and most talented all-around players, completely indispensable to the Flyers and their future? The argument could go on forever.
Of course. Look at the league's last five seasons. No one has scored more points than Giroux.
Please. Then why did Team Canada keep him off its Olympic roster in 2014? Why was he a fourth-line player during this year's World Cup of Hockey? He sure seems to be considered the worst of the worst among the best of the best.
He's underrated. Put some world-class players on the ice with him, and he'll show you what he can do.
He has played with Jaromir Jagr. And Scott Hartnell. And Jake Voracek. And Wayne Simmonds. And since he's become the Flyers' No. 1 center, they've never advanced beyond the second round of the postseason tournament. They've missed the playoffs twice. And where was he last spring in that series against the Capitals? One lousy assist in six games? He's 5-foot-11 and 185 pounds - too small to lug the kind of high-demand minutes that the Flyers need from him.
He was hurt in that series. He had hip and abdominal surgeries in May. You forgot about that, huh? Should I remind you of what he's done when he's been healthy? The five All-Star Game selections? The Hart Trophy finalist in 2014? That stretch from 2011 to 2014, when he scored 227 points in 207 games? He's on the power play. He kills penalties.
Get back to me when you have a better idea of what's really going on.
Maybe this season, we will. There are fewer unknowns for Giroux and the Flyers entering this season than there were entering last. He has recovered completely from the surgery, he said this week. He and his teammates have had more time to master head coach Dave Hakstol's system, and general manager Ron Hextall, relatively speaking compared with years past, made minimal changes to the roster, adding two promising rookies in Ivan Provorov and Travis Konecny and two veteran role players in Boyd Gordon and Dale Wiese.
Those latter two are more significant than one might first think. Giroux will turn 29 in January, and his point totals have declined for three consecutive seasons, and the acquisitions of Gordon and Wiese were a function of the Flyers' plan to reproportion Giroux's ice time. They don't want to lessen it. There's no reason to. He has averaged roughly 201/2 minutes a night for three years now - right in the 19-22-minute target range in which Hextall and Hakstol want to keep him - and last season he was on the ice for 3:51 of power-play time per game, the third-highest among all the league's forwards.
No, the goal is to free Giroux to play in more even-strength situations. Last season, in part because of his ability to win faceoffs and give the Flyers greater opportunities to maintain possession of the puck, he spent close to a minute and a half of each game killing penalties, a role that the Flyers hope Gordon and Wiese can fill, Gordon in particular. Among players who took at least 900 faceoffs last season, Giroux's win percentage of 57.5 ranked fifth. Gordon's, 57.9, ranked third.
Assume, then, that Gordon's and Wiese's presences allow Giroux to spend half as much time on the ice when the Flyers are shorthanded. Over 82 games, Giroux's five-on-five ice time would increase by 611/2 minutes - more than an entire regulation game. That would be no small benefit for Hakstol in his second season as an NHL head coach: the chance to use his best forward in situations that Hakstol would want to use him, instead of in situations that Hakstol felt he had to. If nothing else, the shift away from those most demanding minutes ought to provide a clearer sense of just who Giroux is, who he can be, and what he can do.
"I knew what type of player he was," Hakstol said. "I'd watched him as a player. That's probably the easier part of it. Just getting to know G and the way he goes about his business, I think what really stands out is his commitment and competitiveness and his will to help his team be successful. That's one of the traits that makes him a great leader."
"He grew a lot over the years I've been here, as a person and as a player, and it shows," Voracek said. "It doesn't always have to show up on the scoreboard."
Yes, they love Giroux in that locker room and throughout that organization, even if everyone else in and around the NHL wonders where his place in the league's hierarchy of great players really is. He does what's needed. . . . He doesn't do enough. . . . He's the kind of guy you win with. . . . He hasn't won a Stanley Cup.
Is he even on that list at all, and what does he think of all this?
"I don't care," Claude Giroux said.
@MikeSielski