Montreal Canadiens Giving Carey Price No Reason To Return This Season

This season has been quite the rollercoaster, if a rollercoaster just went straight down to the centre of the Earth. The Montreal Canadiens are 7-23-4, good for 18 points, and behind even the Ottawa Senators. They are ahead of just the Arizona Coyotes right now, and are behind even the Seattle Kraken, who have followed the more traditional route of expansion teams by being pretty terrible.

There are a myriad of reasons for this fall from Stanley Cup Finalists to the second worst team in the league. There was an incredible amount of turnover in the offseason, injuries have been bad and lately they have one of the worst COVID outbreaks in the league (their last game was played with just 11 forwards and 5 defensemen, most of them AHL regulars).

And another thing: arguably the Canadiens best player, and the face of the franchise for a decade now, Carey Price has not played a game this year.

After a lengthy playoff run where he played all of Montreal’s postseason games, then General Manager Marc Bergevin announced that Price would miss the start of the season with a knee injury. Original valuation stated that Price might be available to start the season against the Maple Leafs.

But then he entered the NHL Player Assistance Program, and has since exited, but that extended his stay off the ice. And there hasn’t been much news yet. The date that he is expected to be back keeps being pushed back and back, and becoming more and more vague to become ‘sometime in the New Year’.

Not that the Habs are giving him any reason to return in any kind of rapid fashion. Price is not a young man anymore, he is 34 years old, and it is safe to call him injury prone at this point. There’s a question of how many good years he has left, and how many more major injuries until he cannot come back from them anymore. Or not be an elite talent anymore.

Why risk coming back and getting more injured in a losing season? Or if he came back, stole a few more games like he has done in the past, and ruin Montreal’s chances at a really high draft pick. Just thank God that Marc Bergevin put lottery protection on that first round pick he traded for Christian Dvorak.

And it is not exactly a surprise that Price’s time for recovery keeps stretching longer and longer. Who remembers the 2015-16 season? Price only played 12 games that season, before coming down with a debilitating knee injury. It happened in November, and the original story we were spun was that he would be out for about 6 weeks. Well, fast-forward to April and Price had not played another game and it was announced he was shut down for the season.

This is the complete opposite of Montreal’s captain Shea Weber, who just last year came back from a bleak looking prognosis that had some analysts fearing for his career. Well, it only took him out for about two weeks. But there are different types of players, and everyone handles injuries differently.

All I am saying is, don’t be too surprised if Carey Price’s return date keeps getting pushed back further and further, until its announced nearly at season’s end that Price will be shut down for the year. It would be in the best interest for the player’s long term health to just take the full season off.

After all, why would he come back this year, really?