Claude Giroux should be the front runner for the Hart Trophy

Yes, the banner on my blog is Claude Giroux smiling and hugging Steve Mason. Yes, my blog is named after the general manager of the Flyers. Yes, I am very much biased in this matter, but hear me out.

In the recent months, Claude Giroux has risen through the ranks and is as of right now is sitting in 4th place in points scoring. He has scored the most points by any player since December 11th, and while that is kind of a cherry-picked date, it is nevertheless a very significant stretch of more than 3 months now. He is also a clutch player scoring amazing and timely goals such as this one and this one. He is the unquestioned leader of the Flyers, in terms of motivation as well as skill. He has all the things a candidate for the Hart Trophy needs, and then some.

However, it is also not exactly a secret that he had a very poor start. It took him 6 games to register his first point, and 16 to score his first goal on the season. The reasons for this are manifold, starting with a freak golf-injury late in the offseason, him missing the entirety of training camp because of said injury, to a coaching change very early in the season. As a result the Flyers lost 7 of their first 8 games and dropped to dead last, becoming the butt of dumb jokes such as "Q: Why are triangles higher than the Flyers in the NHL standings? A: Because a triangle has three points."

A lot of people use this poor start to knock Giroux. It was most certainly the leading cause for him being left off the Canadian Olympic Roster this year. People also proclaim that a Hart Trophy candidate has to be excellent year-round and Giroux is therefore not qualified. I disagree. I think this poor start showcases exactly why Giroux should be the front runner for the Hart Trophy.

If you recall, the Hart Memorial Trophy is awarded annually to "the player judged to be the most valuable to his team". While the Professional Hockey Writers' Association frequently treats it as a de facto league-wide MVP award, it actually isn't as the last five words make a very important difference compared to the Ted Lindsay Award voted on by the players themselves. I am not arguing here that Giroux is the best player in the world (and for the record: nobody really has except for Peter Laviolette in the spur of the moment that one time). I think he has the potential to be, but he isn't there (yet). What I am saying is that Claude Giroux has the most importance to his team.

While this important distinction between the Hart and the Lindsay is often brought up, an actual quantifiable measure is hard to come by and thus the discussion is often left to speculation and inference. "How good would team X be without player A, and would that be worse than if team Y lost player B?" etc.

Only rarely are there actual circumstances to put this theory to the test. Would the Pittsburgh Penguins be a playoff team without Sidney Crosby? Almost certainly. Just look at the 2011-12 NHL season in which Crosby was limited to 22 games and the Penguins finished 4th in their conference because they have a "backup" in Evgeny Malkin who won the Art Ross Trophy that year. This fact alone should exclude both Crosby and Malkin from any consideration for the Hart Trophy unless the other misses a significant amount of the season due to injury. Now this doesn't mean they aren't excellent players, but their teams would also be able to compete without them, decreasing their relative importance to their team.

However, would the Flyers be a playoff team without Claude Giroux? Almost certainly not. They are on the bubble as it is, and that is after the monster of a performance Giroux has put in recently. This is also where the poor start comes in, because in the fifteen games before Giroux scored his first goal, the Flyers were the owners of a 4-10-1 record and many people had them already eliminated from contention, scoffing at Giroux guarantee that the Flyers would make the playoffs. However, when Giroux started to get going, the Flyers actually became a threat. Since the December 11th date I mentioned above, Giroux has score 51 points in 38 games for a 1.42 PPG pace. Not coincidentally the Flyers are also 23-11-4 in that span.  He is the most important player of the team. The fulcrum around everything revolves.

In my opinion Giroux's season is an interesting study of what purpose the Hart Trophy really serves. Is it just a league-wide "best player" award voted on by a different set of people than the Ted Lindsay Award, or does it have its own meaning and parameters for gaining it? If the latter is the case, Giroux has to be one of the frontrunners for it.