Philadelphia Flyers team captain and leading scorer Claude Giroux missed three games prior to Saturday, and in many ways the Flyers did extremely well to fill the big void he leaves. Thanks in large part to the success of new lines featuring AHL call-ups like Sam Gagner and Nick Cousins, the Flyers top-nine forwards have been as balanced as ever.
In three games without Giroux this week, the Flyers picked up two wins. They have averaged three goals per game in those wins, which is better than their season average of 2.43. It's like the Flyers haven't missed a beat, until you consider the power play.
On the season, the Flyers power play has dipped into the bottom-third of the league at times, but it's never been all that bad in execution or pressure. Over the last month, the Flyers power play has actually been climbing up the league rank, scoring goals at a consistent clip. In the last four games in which Claude Giroux played, the power play scored four times in 16 opportunities while always looking dangerous.
In the three games Giroux has missed, they've looked like a completely different unit. Four of the five players on the top power play unit remain the same, but Giroux is the keystone. Without their keystone, it's been a total collapse.
You could look at it one way and see that the Flyers have one power play goal in five opportunities without Giroux. That's a success rate of 20 percent, which is very respectable. It's even higher than their season rate of 18.4 percent. It is misleading, however, in that the one goal came on a Mark Streit shot somewhat out of the blue, at the tail end of a terribly executed power play.
It is pretty easy to demonstrate this futility statistically. Examining the rate of Fenwick events (aka unblocked shot attempts) reveals a massive difference the last three games.
Yes, it's only three games and five power play attempts. That is an incredibly small sample size, but the only way you can get Fenwick numbers so low is if every single power play opportunity is handled very poorly. In such a small sample, just a single flurry of shots would throw up the numbers.
For point of comparison, everyone knows the Flyers rely heavily on their top power play unit. This is not unusual in the NHL, watching the second unit hardly threaten. Well, the Flyers second unit typically generates about 60 Fenwick/for per 60 minutes. Without Giroux, the Flyers top unit has been operating worse than the struggling second unit.
Thankfully Flyers fans did not have to endure this spectacle any longer. Giroux returned to the lineup on Saturday against the Arizona Coyotes and, on cue, scored a power-play goal. This little experiment does show an area where Giroux is absolutely irreplaceable in the Flyers lineup.
When Giroux's point totals dropped from 86 to 73 points last season, most fans probably hardly noticed. What they may have missed was that Giroux's even-strength goal total dropped nearly in half, from 21 to 11. This led to incredible results, like the fact that Giroux didn't score an even strength goal at home last year until the last week of the season.
This year, Giroux's even strength goal rate is back up. That is important to the team, but not as important as his power play contributions.
Giroux is one of the best power play players in the league, and so long as he is around, the Flyers can expect to have a good power play unit. As Giroux returned to the ice, Jakub Voracek shuffled out. It didn't seem to make a difference on the goal on Saturday, where quick passing from Shayne Gostisbehere to Brayden Schenn to Mark Streit to Giroux set up the Flyers second goal.
Marc Naples is a contributing writer for Flyerdelphia and Sports Talk Philly. Follow him on Twitter @SuperScrub47.
