Rarely do you get the symmetry of a player who’s 1,000. Playing in the NHL, all with the same team, at home, while also serving as his final game in that uniform before being traded to a competitor. It’s hard not to see the divergent stories. A player who devotes his entire career to an organization is good enough to last 1,000 players with just one team and be captain, yet the team and players can not get where everyone wants to go. And so, since the 1,000 players only received that amount shortly, they are both better off chasing the summit away from each other. It is almost perfect in its destruction.
Claude Giroux passed this mark last night in Philly, and it will probably be his last match with the Flyers. 1,000 players, 10 seasons as captain, 900 points. Giroux went through everything with the Flyers, came up with the best they could and came close to ever winning a cup, an unholy terror on the third line, for the Hawks 2010 had no answer. But it was all enough because the Hawks ‘best was better than the Flyers’ best over Giroux. Giroux was there for other competing teams, some teams were just awful, and all the other types in between. There were false sunrises, complete mistakes, surprise runs, and all this shortly after a certain degree.
Giroux came as something of a pass-first, playmaking center, to an all-action, do-it-all, to a more one-dimensional sniper on the wing in his later years. Perhaps his greatest achievement is that he outscored Sidney Crosby in the first half of the 2010s absolute nuts, with Crosby openly admitting in the press how much he could not stand Giroux. It might even have kept Giroux off the 2014 Olympic team, as Hockey Canada never upset its precious child in Sid. Hey, USA Basketball kept Isiah Thomas at home while the Dream Team went to Barcelona because Michael Jordan would not play with him. It happens.
But now Giroux is just old enough, and just mobile enough with his contract ready to expire after the season, that he does not need to be yet another Flyers Reconstruction / Construction collapse, which they tend to do every five years or so. Giroux has just so little time on the ice, and he will not waste it waiting for the flyers. It’s possibly the Panthers for him now, even though the Avs have called.
Giroux is yet another Flyers Linchpin who could not quite get there. He joins forces with Eric Lindros, Rick Tocchet, John LeClair, Mike Richards, even Chris Pronger, who either left without Baubles or did not bring the silverware they had already won with them back to Philly. And in some ways it is the natural state of the flyers. They may not have the longest championship dry hockey stick, but they have the hard ones south of the border (they will never play with the Leafs). It’s a strange combination with the Flyers and their loyalists, a self-harm with a self-righteousness, even though many fan bases get that. The Flyers are still married to the bullies persona of the 70s of grit and toughness in hitting everyone’s shots, but that has not produced too many parades since 1975.
Not that the Flyers have been trying lately to mimic Bobby Clarke’s era, because one can not in the NHL today. But flyers can not get that right either. Perhaps no other city happily defines its historic athletes with the fact that they have not won a championship more than Philly. Iverson, Barkley, Lindros, it’s right at the top of every biography. Because no city is quite as happy as Philadelphia. There really is no one left to do it now with what has become of Boston. Sport will be increasingly important on the east coast for several reasons (the weather is expensive, it’s expensive and full and ever more, the chances are that it’s a gas leak, and it’s likely to fall into the ocean for too long. You need no distraction?) And Philly is the last one in the pit who’s still stuck in the sea. Imagine if Nick Foles had not gone on that three-week warm-up or Cole Hamels had not been born?
Giroux was great. He alone was not enough. The flyers could not surround him with enough. It’s an old story now. This is how they really celebrate, giving the player more mystique. More tragic, especially when he collects a ring elsewhere. It’s the new Philadelphia story. Happy Trails, G.
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