Giroux, star counterparts flex their PR muscles
Claude Giroux spends most of his year working out at a Skate Zone facility that ranks somewhere above state of the art. When the time comes to go home, which for the Flyers has been too early for most of Giroux’s career, there are plenty of fitness facilities in greater Ottawa to keep him at something akin to playing shape.
Giroux is home in Ottawa now, but only for the same reason that those Ottawa fitness facilities aren’t available to any members, NHL star or not.
No need to worry, though...
“I have a bike in my basement and that’s pretty much it,” Giroux said on a somewhat state-of-art NHL conference call Thursday. “So I’m kind of doing the old school workout. I’m doing push-ups and sprints. I’m just trying to stay busy, but it’s definitely tough when you don’t have the equipment for it.”
No one, from the Canadian prime minister whose wife tested positive for COVID-19, to the oh-so unprepared American president to everyone else around the globe, could have forseen this silent, unseen enemy that has stricken us so severely.
“You can see what happens overseas, it’s gotten really bad really quick, and then it’s kind of slowly getting over here,” Giroux said. “So I try to stay as informed as possible. Here in Ottawa, everybody is staying home. No one is going anywhere. I think everybody’s kind of weighing what every country is trying to do and hopefully it gets better soon.”
In the little corner of the world occupied by hockey’s best professional players, however, there is just as little clarity on the situation as everywhere else.
A rather strange pair of Metropolitan Division conference calls on this day, one featuring Giroux, Penguins captain Sidney Crosby and brotherly rivals Jordan Staal of Carolina and Marc Staal of the
Rangers; and another featuring Washington’s Alex Ovechkin and three other guys that drew comparatively little notice (Devils defenseman P.K. Subban, Columbus’ Nick Foligno and Islanders forward Anders Lee) easily revealed that.
“It’s not like anything I ever experienced before, so (I’m) just doing what I can to make the best of it and do what we can do to get through it,” Sid no longer the Kid said.
That established, the conference call questions ranged from what social media accounts the star players followed to their video game acumen (don’t ask Giroux about his new Xbox) to how they feel about a world-wide pandemic interrupting their seasons.
Just another day in the NHL it was not.
“It’s hard to be stuck in limbo and to really not have an idea or a goal or maybe a date to kind of set yourself up for being at your peak when the puck is dropped,” Jordan Staal said. “So basically, it’s getting your mind off that ... getting the sweat in if you can, get the heart rate up and kind of stay in the best shape that you can.”
That’s a bit of a challenge, as Giroux’s exercise regimen could attest. Hey, maybe the bike is more Peloton than converted Schwinn-on-astand.
“We don’t have a ton of resources that way, so you just make the best of what you have and try to be professional, and make sure we’re in the best shape we can possibly be in,” Crosby said. “But there’s nothing like skating. ... You just have to make the best of it.”
No one knows what the end game will be for any of this, of course, and despite the proclamations of NHL executives that they will somehow, some way play a full regular season, no one knows how a 2019-20 season that featured a dramatic late-stage rise by the Flyers (4121-7, 89 points) will – or quite possibly won’t – play out.
They went 18-5-1 over their last 24 games to pull within a single point of the Metro Division-leading Capitals (90 points). Despite several contingency guesses about continuing the season during the spring or summer ... no one knows whether that might happen.
“Obviously a little (frustrating),” Giroux said. “We were playing some good hockey, we were in a good position to go into the playoffs. But you know what, I’ve been thinking about it every day, when we were going to come back or if we come back and what the possibilities are going to be. You obviously think about it, but you don’t want to overthink it.
“As much as it is frustrating, I think you have to stay optimistic here.”