NHL 20: Calgary Flames Mark Giordano’s rating is a Joke

Apparently winning the Norris Trophy for being the leagues best defensemen doesn’t make you one of the top 30 players in the NHL to EA Sports. MarkGiordano’s rating should have been higher.

Mark Giordano has an 89 rating in NHL 20. While most players who get this ranking are pretty good and should be deserving of that number, it just doesn’t make sense how you can not put the Calgary Flames defenseman’s rating higher and in the top 30 of player rankings.

I’ve been playing these NHL games since I was a kid. (NHL 01). I have been editing rosters ever since and there is always a couple per year that makes me want to close a car door on someone’s hand. This is one of them.

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Giordano not being ranked in the top 30 of all players just makes no sense when you have players like Anze Kopitar stay the same ranking (90) for two years in a row even though he had one of the worst seasons of his career. The Flames captain was 2nd in scoring for defensemen last year with 74 points, was tied for 3rd in goals scored by a defenseman with 17, and won the Norris Trophy.

I am starting to think it’s just because of his age. The EA NHL Franchise loves to promote players who are retired, but if you’re playing and you are over the age of 33, you don’t exist. In their franchise mode barely any players make it to the age of 38, let alone 40.

That’s even if they have productive seasons the year prior. So seeing Giordano is being ranked like this it doesn’t surprise me in the least. That’s something that I am hoping they fix in this years game regarding how players age.

The best part about this whole thing is the fact that Giordano won’t even be the highest-rated member of the Flames. EA just revealed that Johnny Gaudreau is the 90 overall making him the 20th ranked overall player in the entire game.

Obviously, the debate there would be is a player who gets you 99 points is he more important to your team versus your best defender who was judged to be the best in the entire league. In no way do I think that what Gaudreau did last season wasn’t special. He had one of the best seasons ever by a Flames forward. I just wonder why both players wouldn’t be rated equally if you think both were equally as important to their teams in their own way.

I know, this seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. I usually wouldn’t make this big of a fuss. EA, for the most part, does a decent job at creating the right overalls for their star players. The bigger overarching issue with this franchise is their ability to update the depth players on their rosters who ultimately get thrown to the side and makes the game a lot less realistic.

When you get draft after draft and only skilled players come up and no solid third or fourth-liners in set roles come in, it just makes the whole point of drafting useless when the computers only create one type of skilled player that doesn’t play defense. That’s a bigger story for another time though.

Point being it doesn’t make sense for a player like Giordano who was judged to be the best defensemen last season to not be ranked in the top 30 of all players in the NHL. It’s a joke that someone thought that was smart.