With Alain Vigneault losing his job as head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers and Mike Yeo being the sixth head coach in ten years, Claude Giroux gets a lot of criticism for it and gets dubbed “coach killer”, “bad leader”, “good player, bad captain”, “not clutch” and the list goes on. Giroux will forever get the back-end of the stick for as long as he remains on the Philadelphia Flyers without a Stanley Cup ring on his finger. What quantifies a bad leader? Better yet, what quantifies a good leader? How can someone who’s been around for 15 years, hold several franchise records, and receive raving accolades from almost all his former teammates, be a pariah in his own city?
No Flyers captain has won a Stanley Cup other than Bobby Clarke, yet no Flyers captain has received so much acrimonious hate outside of Claude Giroux. Yes, he’s been around since the downfall of the franchise in the early 2010s and has been the captain for most of those years, if not all. However, what is one player supposed to do amongst a myriad of sporadic talent? People are very quick to point out captains like Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, but forget to mention how the team around those players were perennial Cup contenders.
Ovechkin went most of his career with the label of a bad teammate, bad leader, and not a playoff producer. It took him 13 seasons to win a Stanley Cup and then all of a sudden that label disappeared. Evgeny Kuznetsov led the team with 32 points in 24 games, and Nicklas Backstrom was right behind Ovechkin’s 27 points, with 23 of his own. T.J. Oshie had 21, John Carlson had 20, Lars Eller had 18, and Tom Wilson chipped in with 15 in 3 less games. All this on top of the fact that Braden Holtby went 16-7 with a 2.16 GAA and a .922 save percentage. The point being that one player can make a great difference, but his leadership and quantifying stats aren’t the be-all-end-all for any team.
When Sidney Crosby won his second championship, Phil Kessel led the team in goals with 10 and points in 22. Evgeni Malkin trailed Crosby by one point with 18 in one less game, Nick Bonino had 18 points and a team high 14 assists, Carl Hagelin had 16 points, and Kris Letang had 15. Matt Murray played brilliantly with a 15-6 record on top of a 2.08 GAA and a .923 save percentage and the Kessel-Bonino-Hagelin trio stole the show. A good team around a great player will give you fantastic results.
What about “great” captains that never won the Stanley Cup? Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau, Mats Sundin, Paul Kariya, and Jarome Iginla? All great players, current and future Hall of Famers, but all of them captaining their sides to no Cups. Thornton and Marleau both had deep and dangerous Sharks teams that never lifted the holy grail. Sundin played for a Toronto organization with no salary cap, hellbent on spending every dollar imaginable to win a cup; it never happened.
Furthermore, Paul Kariya played for the hapless Mighty Ducks who had a chance of glory in 2003 but fell in a game 7 to Martin Brodeur and the Devils. Iginla was a great goal scorer and played a gritty style of hockey that brought about change in Calgary but unfortunately for him as well, he fell in a game 7.
Would stripping the captaincy have done anything in terms of success for the Philadelphia Flyers? Probably not, because their issues stemmed from no primary options, lack of secondary options, and a putrid defense-goaltending combo. Other captains in Flyers history that get great praise like Keith Primeau, Eric Lindros, and Mike Richards never won a Cup either, so how is it that Giroux’s captaincy specifically is the reason the Flyers are still hapless?
Do captains like Ovechkin, Mike Modano, and Zdeno Chara get a pass because they won one championship? It seems to be the bar of a good leader nowadays. Obviously winning a Stanley Cup is great for your legacy as a captain, but the idea that a captain plays such an important role in a victory is insane. He’s one of 18 skaters on the team, he can only do so much to alter the game, he can’t control the games of his fellow teammates, let alone their lack of skill. With the Flyers being so depleted in terms of secondary scoring, even tertiary scoring; stopping the Flyers was the easiest thing for most playoff teams, who had several shutdown options.
“Coach killer” gets thrown around a lot as well since the Flyers have had six different head coaches during the last 10 years. Peter Laviolette, Craig Berube, Dave Hakstol, Scott Gordon, Alain Vigneault, and now Mike Yeo have all had the opportunity to coach a Giroux-led squad and all of them before Yeo were fired for different reasons aside from Gordon.
Paul Holmgren described the firing of Laviolette as a “gut decision” based on how bad the team looked in pre-season and the first 3 games of the ensuing regular season. He didn’t like how they fared in the lockout-shortened season the year prior but wanted to give his head coach the benefit of the doubt.
Berube, who replaced Laviolette, had a good but short run for the Flyers where he finished 75-58-28 in two seasons but several players, especially Vincent Lecavalier, didn’t agree or like his coaching methods. It might’ve been a rash decision on the end of Philadelphia, but they didn’t want to squander another opportunity so they decided to venture out for a new coach.
In stepped Dave Hakstol, who is third all-time in Flyers history for most games coached, but everyone could safely agree that the end of his tenure was written on the wall. It was painfully obvious but Ron Hextall wasn’t going to do the deed, so the Flyers fired the general manager first and then the coach soon after. Scott Gordon was only serving as the interim until season’s end so Giroux had nothing to do with his dismissal.
Chuck Fletcher brought in a coaching staff he thought would help the hapless Flyers and his entire M.O. was leadership and experience. Alain Vigneault had success in his first year but lost the team shortly after. He quarrelled with several players, who all unsurprisingly departed the team this past summer, and with Fletcher still believing in his head coach, brought him back with a revamped roster. After it became obvious that his words were being muffled and falling on deaf ears, the Flyers have now brought in their 6th head coach, assistant coach-turned-interim, Mike Yeo.
Is coach killer still applicable? I wouldn’t think so. Team play cost Laviolette, Berube lost the locker room like Vigneault and Hakstol, and Gordon served as an interim for the remainder of that season. Is the “bad” team play Giroux’s fault? For those who would want to say yes, look no further than the lack of primary and secondary options this team has had from 2012-13 to 2016-17.
When mentioning the lack of a supporting cast for most of Giroux’s career, it is generally met with a few eye rolls because it’s seen as an excuse. However, when you dive in deeper and see what Giroux has done for most of his career, surrounded by a few good players and a whole lot of nothing, it’s even more eye-opening.
Giroux paced the team in points in all but two seasons from 2012-13 to 2018-19, with his running mate Jakub Voracek right behind him. Wayne Simmonds and Brayden Schenn found themselves in the top 5 of the team scoring in most years but that had more to do with the lack of depth around the “core four”. Apart from the four, there were sporadic efforts from the remaining players like Daniel Briere, Scott Hartnell, Matt Read, Michael Raffl, Sean Couturier, Valtteri Filppula, and Jori Lehtera, amongst a myriad of others.
The defensive units the Flyers possessed and ran out on a nightly basis was horrifyingly brutal for the most part. The core of the defense between 2012-13 and 2016-17 revolved around the ageing wonders of Kimmo Timonen and Mark Streit, and then a huge drop-off to Nick Schultz, Nicklas Grossmann, Braydon Coburn, Luke Schenn, Brandon Manning, Andrew MacDonald, Michael Del Zotto, and spare parts in Bruno Gervais, Erik Gustafsson, Kurtis Foster, and Carlo Colaiacovo. Shayne Gostisbehere was the only hopeful in the mix as he provided a spark like no other, one that the team hadn’t seen in years.
The goaltending was up and down, which is what you would expect from the Flyers as they went through the Ilya Bryzgalov debacle, which led into the Steve Mason era pretty nicely, and then ended with the oft-injured Michal Neuvirth and Brian Elliott.
Look back at every Stanley Cup contender or winner since 2012-13 and find one that wouldn’t be able to shut this team down? You look at who the Flyers had playing behind Giroux, not forgetting that Michael Raffl found himself on the top 6 for awhile. The defense was middling at best, and even that is a stretch and then you add in the goaltending, which featured in the low 20s several times around the NHL, and it becomes even more obvious that the Flyers were never a true playoff team during Giroux’s captaincy.
He brought the team to whatever little glory they’ve accumulated in the last decade, alongside Voracek. Captaincy and leadership is one intangible amongst several others that have equal weight in a championship team. The Flyers never had primary or secondary scoring options, their defense was never good, their goaltending faltered, and the depth around the organization that could have actually made a difference for Giroux was severely lacking.
Sidney Crosby had a team. Alex Ovechkin had a team. Jonathan Toews had a team. Zdeno Chara had a team. Dustin Brown had a team. Alex Pietrangelo had a team. What’s the common denominator for all these Stanley Cup wielding captains? They had a deep, balanced, dangerous, and well-orchestrated team around them.
