Remember back in 2013-14 when Mark Giordano was the frontrunner for the Norris Trophy essentially all year long, then he missed a few too many games with injury and people seemingly forgot about him? He ended up finishing 10th in votes.
Then, in 2014-15, Giordano was once again seen as the frontrunner for the Norris for a huge portion of the season, but he got injured once again and it knocked him down to sixth.
Since then, he’s finished 13th, eighth, and 16th in voting, and is rarely mentioned as one of the NHL’s elite despite playing on arguably the best defence pairing in hockey throughout those years.
The Flames getting mediocre results over that time certainly has something to do with it, but at 35-years-old, Giordano has somehow defied age and remains one of the NHL’s most dominant and well-rounded defencemen.
Coming into this season, I had Giordano ranked fourth among defencemen over the last three seasons in overall impact, after ranking fifth the year before, and second in 2016. The only defencemen who have consistently ranked ahead of him over that time are Erik Karlsson, Drew Doughty, and P.K. Subban, all players that are six or seven years his junior, and the unquestionable elite tier of the league.
That Giordano is able to produce a similar impact on the game to those three defencemen in the back parts of their prime years, when he’s supposed to be in decline, is incredible.
Giordano’s standout area is his defensive play, with the Flames giving up about half as many passes to the slot-against when he’s on the ice than when he’s off. He’s a singular force to inhibit the shot quality of opponents in a similar way that we see with Patrice Bergeron.
However, defence isn’t what I want to highlight about his game right now. What’s stuck out to me lately is how much he’s stepped up his offensive game in the absence of Dougie Hamilton.
While last year Giordano’s involvement in creating scoring chances was strong — he ranked 26th in the NHL among defencemen — this year he has stepped it up to an obscene degree, ranking fifth among all defencemen in that area.
Most of Giordano’s scoring-chance generation comes from his passing game, which is among the league’s elite. He has completed the fourth-most offensive-zone passes of all defencemen in the NHL this season, with a higher success rate than anyone else in the top five except for Karlsson.
He’s also fifth among all defencemen in passes to the slot at even strength, and his playmaking numbers would actually be in the top 65 among forwards, equal to players like Max Domi and Mark Scheifele. That’s just obscene.
Giordano isn’t an elite holder of the offensive blue line, though he is better than average, but where he does excel in keeping offensive zone possession going is offensive-zone loose-puck recoveries. The Flames have a mobile defensive group and aren’t afraid to let their defenders join in on forechecks and cycles down low, and as a result, Giordano is fourth in the league among defencemen in recovering loose pucks in the offensive zone.
So, put all this together, and Giordano extends offensive-zone possession time by keeping the puck on Flames players’ sticks, is one of the most dangerous offensive defencemen in the league as a creative and successful playmaker, and he hasn’t sacrificed any of his strong defensive numbers in order to make these improvements in his offensive game.
I have a ton of respect for Hamilton, and the same goes for T.J. Brodie, but there’s a reason why, for five seasons and now a sixth, fans and media love to talk up the defensive partner of Giordano.
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He makes okay players good, and he makes good players great. Though he was a late bloomer, he was probably a close-to-elite-level defenceman as far back as 2008-09, when he returned to Calgary after playing a year in Moscow. It just took the league at large a long time to recognize it.
It’s a strange situation, because Giordano is a throwback defenceman in that he hits hard, he blocks shots, and he’s punishing to play against. But he’s also an adept puck mover and has scored an average of almost 16 goals per 82 games over the last five years. Giordano is the bridge between the bruising defenders of the early 2000s and the smooth puck-movers of the modern NHL. He’s probably many people’s idea of the perfect defenceman, and yet he doesn’t get much hype, despite playing in a Canadian market.
Heck, he plays in the home of Hockey Canada, which is headquartered in Calgary and runs its summer programs there, yet he’s been looked over in the past for inferior players like Jay Bouwmeester as recently as the 2016 World Cup of Hockey.
It doesn’t make much sense, and he’s a player we could appreciate a lot more than we do. At 35-years-old, we won’t get to watch him forever.
