Kovacevic: A Price without a match

There's no telling when, where or even if the Penguins and Canadiens could meet in the Stanley Cup playoffs this summer.

Since, of course ... you know.

But assuming they do -- and there's reasonable optimism to be found within the weekend's player vote approving a 24-team tournament that would align these two opponents in a best-of-five preliminary round -- then I'll also safely assume the following:

1. Carey Price will be awesome.
2. The Penguins will prevail, anyway.

I know, bold, right?

Hey, it's been a while. I'm allowed to ease back into the prediction business.

Tackling the latter first: Montreal's no match. Not in any context, even this apocalyptic one. The Canadiens played 71 games in the regular season and won a grand total of 19 in regulation, dangling 10 points out of the final wild-card spot at the March 12 shutdown at 31-31-9. They'll get their top scorer back from IR in Tomas Tatar, but the other side gets Jake Guentzel, and that's no match, either.

No group of skaters that's got Tatar, Brendan Gallagher, Max Domi, Shea Weber and a couple others could fairly be called terrible, but it's equally fair to suggest that their place in the standings -- 24th overall and, thus, the worst team in this tournament -- is an accurate reflection of reality.

All else being equal, I'd take the Penguins in 2.5.

And yet, all else might not be equal. Because Montreal's player at the most important position hasn't had an equal for the better part of his career.

Check Price's goals-against average, and it's 2.79, good for 32nd in a 31-team league. His save percentage of .909 carries the same rank. To the distant observer, he appears to be no better than the team employing him. And as a result, his oft-cited elite status tends to come with no shortage of detractors.

I'm not one of them. I covered his first NHL victory -- Oct. 10, 2007, at the Civic Arena -- as well as his most prominent performance, for Canada's gold-medal entry in the Sochi Olympics in 2014, when he was Mike Babcock's unwavering choice from an all-universe pack. And all he's done over a dozen-plus NHL seasons around that is win the Vezina Trophy as top goaltender and Hart Trophy as MVP, both in 2015, and get selected to six All-Star Games while -- oh, by the way -- passing the legendary Jacques Plante a year ago for most victories for hockey's most decorated franchise.

Unlike Plante or Patrick Roy, though, Price hasn't exactly been surrounded by much in Montreal. As a result, he's appeared in only 60 playoff games against 682 regular-season games, and none since 2017.

Want to know who can tell the difference?

For that, always, always, always ask the participants. I've done that forever across all sports, and it never fails. They see, hear and feel detail we never could. They're informed of specific facets through coaches' films that we'd never know. And when assessing opponents, they'll be as fair and objective as anyone.

When I've asked the Penguins over the years, it's been Price. By a metric mile.

When the NHL Players Association conducted its annual survey of its membership earlier in this 2019-20 season, surveying 588 total players, the selection for the league's best goaltender went to Price with an incredible 41.55 percent of the vote. Marc-Andre Fleury was a remotely distant second at 8.93 percent.

Doubt the veracity of that?

Think the athletes maybe didn't invest much thought into it?

OK, try this: Best forward went to Connor McDavid with 68.35 percent, with Sidney Crosby a remotely distant second at 14.93 percent.

But when that same survey challenged players to choose "one player to have on your team if you had to win a single game," Crosby leapfrogged McDavid, 44.03 percent to 30.53.

So yeah, they were awake. And you'd better believe they know.

Price remains athletic as ever at age 32 and covers plenty of net at 6-3, 217 pounds, but neither of those traits mean as much, as people inside the game will attest, as his unrivaled combination of cool, confidence and technical brilliance.

That was evident again on a first-hand basis this past winter in three meetings with the Penguins:



I rewatched all three games over the weekend, if only because ... my goodness, it was fun to watch three hockey games that might actually mean something toward the future, you know?

And I was reminded throughout, in seeking out examples of what Price does best, that it's seldom the super-splashy.

Here’s a save from the first of those meetings, the 4-1 Montreal victory: