The Montreal Canadiens were excluded from another NHL Network list, and although Carey Price didn’t make the cut, he’s still a top goaltender in the NHL.
The NHL Network was at it again with their Top Players List series. And similar to the rankings they had for centres, wingers, and defence, there were no Montreal Canadiens players there. The most recent list was for goaltenders, and although Carey Price was ranked fifth by the fan vote, he was nowhere to be found on the main list.
However, this is not really surprising. The rankings are heavily based on what the player did in the previous season so Price not being there is to be expected. On the bright side, he was ranked the number one goaltender in NHL 19 with a 92 rating.
The 31-year-old had a season where anything that could’ve gone wrong did go wrong. The players in front of him were an element of it, especially with Shea Weber on the sidelines, but combine that with a lower-body injury and a concussion, and you get the master recipe for a un-Price-like year. But one bad season doesn’t and shouldn’t change the scope of a player’s stock in the league.
Price identified another aspect of his performance that could’ve contributed to the number of goals he allowed in an article for Sportsnet saying:
"I found I was getting too spread out, like getting your feet too far apart from each other. You are pretty much committed to the shot essentially when you do that, so that’s something we’ll be continuing to work on, keeping more of a neutral position and that will allow me to move better in any situation."
That most likely ties into one of the noticeable faults of his season in that his high-danger save percentage (HDSV%) at 5v5 was lower than usual at .746. Price’s HDSV% hasn’t fallen out of the .800’s since the 2012-13 season when he went 21-13-4.
One of the goaltenders biggest complements in his career has revolved around his positioning and how he makes the hardest saves look the easiest. It was clear that was another element lost missing from his game last season and something that hopefully returns to the Bell Centre.
There’s no doubt in any Montreal Canadiens fan that Carey Price will get back to the goaltender everyone knows he can be. How that affects the rest of the team is too soon to tell, but a ‘on top of his game’ Price leads to wins, it’s a plain fact (whether the Habs should be striving for those wins or not is another conversation). And he’ll need to right a lot of wrongs as he’ll be entering the first year of that $84 million contract.
The 2005 fifth-overall pick has done enough in his career to get the benefit of the doubt. There are younger goaltenders climbing the ranks who are making an early name for themselves in Connor Hellebuyck and Andrei Vasilevskiy who will most likely be present on those kinds of lists in the future. However, Price is still a top goaltender in the NHL and a bad season shouldn’t change the perception of that in anyone’s eyes.