Quote:
Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen
Well he did neither in Calgary.
I think this vote illustrates the confusing nature of the vote to me. Giguere would go on to be an awesome player, but in Calgary he was a fourth stringer when we didn't have great goalies. Less than 20 games started, few wins, poor save percentage. We're obviously not comparing him to Iginla, but at least Baertschi contributed to the Flames in the few (but 3x more than JS) games that he did play. Giguere was just sort of here.
If it wasn't for his success after leaving the Flames, this vote is a landslide for Baertschi in my opinion.
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Looking back on stats 20 years later you can say Giguere had "less than 20 games started, few wins, poor save percentage" but at the time there was lots of promise that won't show from the stats alone. '98-'99 was a tire-fire and keep in mind Giguere was a 21-year-old thrown to the wolves
and was hurt. The year before him and Tyler Moss shared the Hap Holmes Award (the AHL equivalent of the Jennings Trophy) and the team lost in the Calder Cup finals. The Baby Flames were awful in '98-'99 without Giguere and Moss.
The next year they brought in Grant Fuhr to back up Freddie Brathwaite, but Fuhr should have hung his skates up; he was atrocious. Far worse than Giguere was in somewhat limited action during a two-month stretch in the middle of the season when Fuhr was hurt. Giguere only got four starts in 28 games, and they were mostly the latter half of back-to-backs.
Going into the 2000 off-season it looked like they were going to give him a shot as the NHL backup, especially after they traded Moss away to Pittsburgh at the deadline in March. They SHOULD have kept one of them as the NHL backup and sent the other packing for opportunities elsewhere, and that's what we all thought they'd done, until they jettisoned Giguere off to Anaheim in June and two weeks later brought in old-and-busted Mike Vernon to back up Brathwaite.
At the time I wondered WTF Craig Button was doing (it was Button's first action as GM, only a few days after he was hired) but in retrospect he was getting something for Giguere because he figured he'd lose him at the expansion draft. Anaheim saw the potential, they protected Giguere; he'd only been Ducks property for two weeks and they were so confident in him they left Guy Hebert, Dominic Roussel and Corey Hirsch exposed.
