Montreal Canadiens: It’s Time to Just Shut Carey Price Down For Season

The Montreal Canadiens have gone from the pinnacle of hockey, the Stanley Cup Final, to the cellar of the NHL standings in a hurry.

It seems like a lifetime ago that Artturi Lehkonen scored off the rush on Robin Lehner of the Vegas Golden Knights to win Game 6 in overtime and send the Canadiens to their first final in 28 years.

It has been pretty much all downhill since then. The Canadiens would lose the first three games of the Stanley Cup Final, and ultimately fall in five games. Then, an exodus of talent in the offseason occurred.

Phillip Danault, Tomas Tatar, Corey Perry and Jesperi Kotkaniemi left town as free agents and opened up gaping holes throughout the forward group. An injury to Shea Weber as well as Erik Gustafsson and Jon Merrill leaving as free agents after being acquired at the trade deadline weakened the blue line as well. Obviously, Weber’s absence has had the greatest impact on the back end.

However, the biggest change in this year’s roster compared to the postseason is in goal. Carey Price has not yet played a game and the trio of Jake Allen, Samuel Montembeault and Cayden Primeau haven’t been able to fill the void.

Price was announced as injured shortly after the Canadiens season ended. It sounded quite serious at first, but the timing was interesting. Price was left unprotected ahead of the Seattle Kraken expansion draft, and then a couple of days before the draft this serious injury was announced.

Was Price really injured or did the Canadiens just want the Kraken to stay away?

The Kraken did stay away, and a few days later Price had successful surgery. It was then expected he would be back on the ice during training camp and could be ready for the opening game of the 2021-22 season.

Perhaps the Kraken were duped by the Canadiens and Price as fine!

Not quite. He did hit the ice at the start of training camp, but Price then entered the NHL/NHLPA player assistance program in early October. He was gone for a month before being released in early November and then rejoined the team about a week later.

He was very slowly building toward a return to the lineup and then an enormous Covid outbreak occurred and the team had to shutdown activities for about a week. Price was not allowed into the Canadiens fitness centre to continue his rehab during this time.

The team sent out a release yesterday stating that Price will restart rehabilitation on his knee to repair a torn meniscus.

Restart? He originally started rehabbing the injury in the summer. I suppose he was not rehabbing it in October when he was being treated for substance abuse, but he was back with the team for at least six weeks before the team shut things down due to the Covid outbreak.

So what does restart mean? He is still six weeks away? More?

Six more weeks of rehab would bring us to the end of February. With the later start to this season, the Habs have 26 games scheduled in March and April. That is one-third of their schedule, but after he missed this much time, you have to start to wonder if there is any point in bringing Price back to play this season at all.

The Canadiens are the worst team in the league and won’t be pushing for a playoff spot in March and April. Does it make sense to have Price come back and play 15 games over the final two months? Not really.

At this point, it might make sense to just give Price the season off and make sure he is 100% ready to go at the start of the 2022-23 season.