Claude Giroux: Like me, Flyers goalie Carter Hart won’t ‘panic’ in first postseason | Marcus Hayes

Ten years ago, the Flyers anticipated great things in the playoffs from a young player who had blitzed junior hockey. Claude Giroux, a 22-year-old who just had finished his first full NHL season, fulfilled every bit of that promise.

Now, as the coronavirus restart approaches, the Flyers have that old feeling again about another young player who dominated juniors. But after just 70 NHL starts, can 21-year-old goaltender Carter Hart finally push them back to the Stanley Cup Final?

Past performances indicate he can. Giroux reckons his elite performances as a teenager in juniors prepared him for the Flyers’ run in 2010.

“I’d like to think so,” the captain said. “In any league, the playoffs are a different kind of game. You get to go through the pressure of playing big games. You get that experience."

Hart has the best experience he could have had, Giroux said.

“Carter’s won World Juniors. He’s played in big games,” Giroux said. “This season, when we played big games, he showed up. He doesn’t panic.”

That’s because when a 19-year-old knows the hockey world is watching and his future depends on his performance, the pressure can’t get much higher.

“I’ve gone through different experiences in my hockey career,” Hart said last week. But he allowed, “World Juniors, Western Hockey finals, World Junior gold medal games, outdoor games -- they’re nothing to the magnitude of me going into my first Stanley Cup playoffs. I think those experiences I’ve had in the past, World Juniors and stuff, are definitely things that are going to help me going into the playoffs here.”

So, when the puck drops in August, Hart will be as prepared as Giroux was a decade ago, and that’s why most observers believe Hart will produce.

“You go back to memories,” said retired Flyers sniper Danny Briere, Giroux’s mentor on that 2010 club and a playoff savant himself. “Claude burned the Quebec Major Junior League before he came up. Carter has burned the WHL the last couple of years. And he’s been to two World Junior Championships, where he was dominant as well.”

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In 2008, Giroux won the Guy Lafleur Trophy as the playoff MVP of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. He also won the 2008 league title with the Gatineau Olympiques, when he set a franchise playoff scoring record with 17 goals and 51 points in 19 playoff games, and helped Canada win the World Junior Championship in 2008.

In 2010, as a third-line winger, Giroux scored 10 goals and had 21 points in 23 playoff games, and his shootout goal in the season finale beat the Rangers and sent the Flyers to the playoffs.

“When you get into those key moments, you go back to what you know,” Briere said.

Hart knows how to win.

In the 2014-15 season, he won his professional debut with a shutout and helped the Everitt SIlvertips of the Western Hockey League win their division -- as a 16-year-old. By the time he left juniors he’d won the Canadian Hockey League’s goaltender of the year award twice (the CHL is the Canadian junior league’s umbrella association) and logged a CHL-record 26 shutouts. A cool and talented technician, Hart pushed Canada to a silver medal in the World Junior Championship in 2017, then won gold in 2018.

Does Giroux see himself in Hart?

“A little, I guess,” Giroux said.

Briere does.

“In their cases they both performed very well before they hit the spotlight in the NHL, so yes, I see a similar path,” Briere said. “G had that swagger, that confidence, when he was thrust into that position in 2010. I think it’s the same thing with Carter. He just got better and better as the season went on. I don’t think he’s afraid of the moment.”

He has shone in most of his biggest NHL moments. He won his debut on Dec. 18, 2018, the day after the Flyers fired head coach Dave Hakstol. That came just weeks after the Flyers fired general manager Ron Hextall, in part because of his reluctance to promote Hart.

He won the season opener this year, and he’d won eight of 11 before the lockdown, his only losses coming to Boston and Tampa Bay, the top teams in the Eastern Conference, and the Flyers lost two of those games by 1-0. In his short career Hart is 40-26-4 with a 2.59 goals-against average and a .915 save percentage, and he’s trending up.

The Flyers have witnessed great young playoff goaltending from both sides. Hextall won 15 games and the 1987 Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP even though Wayne Gretzky’s Oilers beat the Flyers in a seven-game Final. Pete Peeters was 22 in 1980 when he won six of his first seven playoff games, allowing just 11 goals, in the Flyers’ run to the Final.

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They’ve seen the other side, too. The Flyers lost to the Sabres in the 2006 playoffs as Ryan Miller, having played just 66 NHL games, allowed five goals in Buffalo’s four wins. Philadelphia also was the site where unheralded Blues rookie Jordan Binnington began his run to a Cup last season, with a shutout Jan. 7, 2019, in his first NHL start and beat Hart as the Flyers lost their seventh straight game.

Hart’s reaction that night? “I’m definitely starting to feel more comfortable in the net.”

His composure intrigues his teammates. Asked which Flyer he’d like to room with in the NHL bubble in Toronto, 30-year-old winger James van Riemsdyk replied, “I’d go with Carter Hart for that. I think it’d be pretty entertaining. It’s funny to hear some of the stuff that’s going on his brain.”

What’s going on in that brain right now?

“I don’t think,” Hart said.

That, generally, was Giroux’s approach in 2010, when he actually was the No. 3 scorer. He was two points short of captain Mike Richards, and he finished nine points behind a scrappy little center named Danny Briere.