Giroux complicates Canada’s puzzle
VANCOUVER — On top of everything else, there was the, uh, golf injury.
You remember: The club that exploded on Claude Giroux during a mid-August round at the Camelot Golf and Country Club in Cumberland, Ont., like a ... well, like an exploding golf club, sending shards of the shaft into his right hand, lacerating tendons, necessitating surgery and six weeks of rehab.
Coming 10 days before the Canadian Olympic hockey team was to assemble its prospective players in Calgary for an ice-free orientation camp, the injury itself was inconvenient, but hardly fatal to Giroux’s prospects of making Team Canada.
It was the other stuff that was worrisome. Not just the inevitable suspicions about how the injury really happened (absent a lawsuit against the club manufacturer, you have to figure there was some fury involved), but more dangerously, Giroux’s 15game goalless streak to start the regular season.
The Philadelphia Flyers went 4-10-1 in that stretch, and by the time Giroux finally scored on Nov. 9, head coach Peter Laviolette was long gone and the Flyers were battling teams like the Edmonton Oilers and Columbus Blue Jackets for “most disappointing” honours.
Some of that negativity was bound to stick to the captain.
Taken together, and especially given Giroux’s decision not to attend the orientation weekend (and knowing how Hockey Canada values its team-building exercises), it was not a major stretch to surmise that Philly’s star centre had played his way out of the Olympic conversation by the first week of November.
Cue the comeback.
Giroux, who had seven lonely assists in those first 15 games, had 28 points in the 23 games (entering Monday night’s against the Canucks) since he finally broke his goal slump against the Oilers on Nov. 9. The Flyers were 14-6-3 in that stretch, and as of today, it’s difficult to imagine Canada’s team heading to Sochi in five weeks’ time without the dynamic 25-year-old from Hearst, Ont.
Difficult, but not impossible. If Giroux makes it, who does executive director Steve Yzerman leave off the team? Jonathan Toews’s trusty sidekick Patrick Sharp? Sidney Crosby’s underrated cohort Chris Kunitz? Premier setup man Joe Thornton? Matt Duchene? Steve Stamkos, if there’s the slightest question about his leg? Marty St. Louis?
The embarrassment of riches Canada’s management team has to choose from, up front, means that a handful of impossible-to-exclude players are going to be excluded. Giroux could be one of them.
“Oh, I don’t think he’s ever really been out of (the conversation),” said Scott Hartnell, the Flyers’ rambunctious veteran forward. “I think everybody knows what he brings to the table: He’s a leader, he’s young, he can skate, make plays, he’s playing the last minute of every game when we’re up a goal — and for the Olympic team he could probably play a lot of different roles.
“Obviously he’s excited about the upcoming announcement, and hopefully he’ll be on there. It would be great to watch him go play for gold.”
Giroux’s excitement appears to be well disguised. In the Flyers’ room Monday, the captain, who took an eight-game (five goals, 10 assists) point streak into the Canucks game, wasn’t entering into any discussions about his chances of being on the Olympic squad when the roster is announced Jan. 7.
“It’s tough not to be thinking about it. There’s a lot of good players in Canada that (could) make that team,” he said. “But the best thing I can do is control what I do on the ice, and that’s going to be my best chance.”
The injury in August, the lack of a proper pre-season or training camp, made his task a lot tougher.
“I don’t think he was 100 per cent when he started the season,” Hartnell said. “The injury with his hand ... in the fall there he didn’t play an exhibition game, he came right into Game 1 without playing and it takes everybody a while to get their timing back and feel good with the puck, and probably it took him a good month to feel comfortable again.
“But the last 20 games, he’s been our best player.”
The Flyers’ woes were far from Giroux’s fault alone. When Laviolette was axed three losses into the season and Craig Berube took over, the team was a mess and seemed to have lost its identity. But Giroux’s slump — the Flyers are 8-0-1 when he has scored a goal, 10-16-3 when he hasn’t — didn’t help.
“Well, that’s tough on anybody, I think,” said Berube. “Especially you’re the captain, you’re a scorer, you’re supposed to be a top player ... it’d put pressure on anybody. But he fought through it, because he works hard, and he’s a good leader. But it was his hard work that got him out of it.”
Just as the Flyers’ disastrous start wasn’t all Giroux’s doing, their recovery hasn’t been, either. Putting Austrian rookie Michael Raffl on the Giroux line with Jakob Voracek has resulted in 32 points in their seven games together, and Wayne Simmonds, playing on a second line with Brayden Schenn and Hartnell, has had three multi-goal games in a row during a 17-9-4 run following the Flyers’ 1-7 start.
“We’ve come a long way. The guys have got our ... stuff together, and the chemistry’s a lot better,” Giroux said. “Obviously, it was a tough start to the year, but we’re going better now, and we’re not looking back.”
And he’s only looking ahead a little, and crossing his fingers, when nobody’s watching.