Quote:
Originally Posted by ricardodw
First of all I am and have been a big Gio fan for a long time.
Gio was NOT considered an excellent d-man before his offensive numbers took off in the Hartley era.
The biggest argument from the pro-Bouwmeester crowd was that the Flames had no other d-man capable of playing on the top pairing against the other teams top line. That was when Gio was 29 years old.
The rest of the "experts" do not think he is near as good as he is held on CP.
In the recent (2016) Norris voting where Gio played 82 games and had his career year scoring he had exactly 1 vote in the Norris as a top 5 d-man in the league. Gio was #2 in Goal scoring as a d-man and #6 in points. Norris voters usually have a bias towards offensive d-men... they sure didn't have a bias for Gio.
By low mileage are you referring to his lack of playoff games? I do not consider missing 20 games a year due to injury to be a sign of low mileage.
Gio is a great defenseman ... It will be extremely hard for him to perform to the level that he is now getting paid
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Won't touch the rest of your post, as I think others have done so by the looks of it, but this bolded part needs correction.
Yes, Giordano was indeed considered an excellent defencemen long before Hartley came on board. When? How about Brent Sutter's first year. Remember part of the rationale for jettisoning Dion? Darryl Sutter came out and said that having Giordano improve so much had made it possible to do that deal.
So yes, he may not have had league-wide recognition, but if you were following the team you would have noticed Giordano really start to stand out on a team with Sarich, Phaneuf, Bouwmeester and Regher. That was an impressive d-core by any measure, and Giordano was in fact pushing up in 2010. That makes roughly 6 years now that he has been an excellent - or better than excellent recently - defencemen.
