Philadelphia Flyers: The ghosts of 2012 are still haunting Claude Giroux
By Paul Boyes
With the ghosts of the 2012 NHL season still looming over Philadelphia Flyers captain Claude Giroux, he appears to be off his game.
Philadelphia Flyers fans, it appears as though Claude Giroux is being haunted by the ghost of playoffs past.
He’s making mental mistakes throughout the first three games of the Flyers first-round series against interstate rivals the Pittsburgh Penguins that he rarely made once a game, all year and trying to force the cross-ice pass to Jake Voracek on the power play. These are the kind of extremely low percentage plays that get picked off or don’t get through because of aggressive forechecking.
They have to change that up with Giroux roving behind the net looking for the two on one down low backdoor play. The power play is too stationary right now and that’s making a mediocre Penguins penalty kill look great.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this from Giroux.
Giroux is chasing ghosts
Back in 2012, ex-coach Peter Laviolette made a post series comment that called Giroux “The best player in the world”.
But why has this haunted the Flyers’ Captain?
It’s because he is so invested in his team and city that he’s putting the entire team’s burden on himself. Now with the history of these two teams and 2012’s War on Ice in the foreground of fan’s minds, the expectations for a similar outcome were high but simply unrealistic, as the 2018 Philadelphia Flyers have such a different team from the 2012 Philadelphia Flyers.
Still though, with the year Giroux had in 2017 when paired with a solid core group, their talented youth and the emergence of Sean Couturier, maybe an upset could happen. The psyche of the team in game one has not only been that of a young team in too deep with their veteran leader dealing with his own demons, the kids shook it off after that game but Giroux hasn’t. He looked better in the second game than the first a, but in game three he was once again forcing plays and coughing the puck up. The faceoff schooling at center ice on the fourth goal was a prime example.
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Simply put, when Giroux plays well, so do the Flyers.
Giroux has been consistently better in the faceoff dot than Crosby over the past six seasons. My first reaction after the third goal was to call a timeout, maybe a reminder to the Captain about Sid’s little chip play that Couturier had successfully negated earlier when attempted at center ice.
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The ghost of 2012 is haunting Claude Giroux. The apparition could become demonic while not baring the number 666 but number 87. Claude Giroux must exorcise this demon so he might reappear in the series and leave the ghost of playoffs past behind him before it’s too late.