A Big Weekend For Former Canadiens Goaltender

While the Montreal Canadiens will be in Toronto to take on the Maple Leafs on Saturday, at least one friendly face will be involved in the likely ceremonial faceoff. It’s induction weekend at the Hockey Hall of Fame, and former Habs netminder Carey Price is in this year’s class alongside Patrice Bergeron, Pekka Rinne, Keith Tkachuk, Brian Burke, and Cindy Curley.

While Price has yet to make his official retirement announcement, he did have a retirement party this summer, and it seems like a foregone conclusion that he will never wear goalie pads in the NHL ever again.

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The netminder spent his whole 15-year NHL career with the Canadiens and became the winningest goaltender in team history. In 712 NHL game in put together a 361-261-79 record with a 2.51 goals-against average and a .917 save percentage. In 10 of those 15 years, he led the Canadiens to the playoffs and posted a 43-45 record with a 2.39 GAA and a .919 SV. He made it once to the Stanley Cup Final back in 2021 when both he and captain Shea Weber were playing through significant injuries and ended up losing 4-1 to the Tampa Bay Lightning.

We’ll never know whether he could have made it there in 2014, when he had a tremendous postseason that was cut short in the first game of the Eastern Conference Final against the New York Rangers, thanks to that now-famous collision with now-Hab Chris Kreider.

While he never won the Stanley Cup, he did win a Hart Trophy, a Ted Lindsay Trophy, a Vezina Trophy, a William M. Jennings Trophy and a Bill Masterton Trophy. He also won a Calder Cup when he joined the Canadiens’ AHL affiliate, the Hamilton Bulldogs, in the 2007 playoffs.

Injuries forced him to sit out the last four years of his eight-year contract which was eventually moved to the San Jose Sharks to give the Habs more financial flexibility, but he never played with them, despite former teammate with the Habs Tyler Toffoli playing a practical joke on his younger teammates, making them believe that Price would be donning the pads again with the Sharks.

Speaking to NHL.com, Maple Leafs center John Tavares had only good things to say about the former masked man:

It was quite a challenge to play against him. I remember the year he won the Hart Trophy, he was pretty much unbeatable that season. He was unbelievable at the Sochi Olympics.

When you played on his team, he allowed you to play with so much confidence. And when you played against him, he was taking it away. He made it look like everything was easy in front of his net.

Clearly, Tavares wasn’t the only one who thought highly of Price, as players voted him best goaltender in the league in the NHPA player poll for three straight seasons, from 2017-18 to 2019-20.

Price fully deserved induction into the Hall, and I expect debate for years to come over whether his number should be raised in the Bell Centre rafters. Had he won a Cup, there would be no debate, and one has to wonder what he could have done if he had played with the kind of firepower the Canadiens now have.

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