Flyers' Giroux a nonfactor vs. Capitals

THINK BACK to the go-ahead goal. This is, admittedly, a bit of a chore, because the go-ahead goal occurred midway through the second period, well before Game 3 devolved into a hailstorm of fists, wristbands and power-play goals that left the Flyers and their fans one game away from elimination thanks to a 6-1 loss.

But it is there where the story of the series really lies. Not the sliver of daylight between Steve Mason's glove and the post, nor the emphatic fist pump from the all-time great watching his wrister rattle around the back of the net, but the giveaway that ignited the pivotal sequence. Claude Giroux was in the center of the neutral zone, trying desperately to make something happen. He attempted to juke a defender, the puck ended up behind him, and Alex Ovechkin ended up with his second goal of the series.

It may not have been the most egregious of errors, nor, perhaps, the most consequential. But the play offered an apt synopsis of what thus far has been a lost series for the Flyers' captain. Against a team that is littered with superstars, the one player on the Flyers' roster who might lay claim to such a designation has, through three games, failed to make his case. Granted, that wasn't how Dave Hakstol saw things afterward with regard to Giroux and the rest of the first line.

"They haven't been able to finish," the Flyers' coach said. "Until the last part of this game, the five-on-five battle has been pretty good throughout the series. Those three haven't been able to finish either five-on-five or on the power play. I don't know that they're being neutralized. The puck hasn't gone in the net for them."

Yet there is something to be said for process, and even in the beginning stages of Monday night's loss, when the Flyers jumped out to a 1-0 lead after an electric tribute to their late founder, they still looked like a team that was on the wrong side of a big deficit in the playmaker department. The Capitals were bigger, faster, stronger - not just in goal or on defense or on the power play, but man against man, star against star, your best against our best. Fair or not, Giroux stands mostly alone when it comes to comparing notes against stars like Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom.

The postseason has long played a central role in the Giroux narrative, going back to that improbable run in 2010 when the 22-year-old forward finished second on the team with 10 goals in 23 games (his 21 points trailed only Danny Briere and Mike Richards). Two years later, after Giroux scored six goals in the Flyers' six-game win over the Penguins in the first round of the playoffs, Peter Laviolette made his famous reference to Giroux as "the best player in the world." It was, perhaps, meant mostly as a dig at the Penguins' Sidney Crosby, but man did it play in the city of Philadelphia. Since then, Giroux has scored exactly four goals in 16 playoff games.

None of those goals has come in the last three games, in what is looking increasingly like a series that did not even need to be played.

"We've played a couple lines against them, a couple D-pairs against them, just playing a 200-foot game," said Capitals coach Barry Trotz, who seemed to take great pleasure in playing the dismissive favorite to the Flyers' punchy underdog after the third period unraveled into a string of fights and penalties, including a minor on the Wells Fargo Center crowd for throwing their commemorative wristbands onto the ice. "That's the key in the playoffs. If you're not willing to play a 200-foot game in the playoffs, you aren't going to be successful."

Of course, by the end of it, any talk of X's-and-O's seemed moot. If anything, Game 3 was a lesson in the fool's gold that is the NHL's all-comers-welcome postseason. Plain and simple, Monday night featured two teams that did not belong on the same ice together. The Flyers' late-season run made for a good story, but in the end they do not have the playmakers that Washington has been able to throw at them shift after shift. If the Flyers were going to win this thing, it was going to take herculean efforts from two players: their goalie, and their star. No doubt, Mason has fallen short of that bar. But so has Giroux.

@ByDavidMurphy

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