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PHILADELPHIA — ‘I don't like talking about my feelings,” he says when the grilling is over and the cameras and microphones have finally retreated. “Maybe it's just a guy thing.”
Carey Price smiles, but the smile is tired and slips away as fast as a Montreal Canadiens lead in recent playoff games. The thing is, everyone wants to know about his feelings.
How is the goaltender this day after the Canadiens' second consecutive loss to the Philadelphia Flyers?
“I feel fine,” he said.
How does it feel to be under such pressure, his team now down 2-1, with a critical fourth game here tonight?
“It's the NHL playoffs,” he said. “I'm 20 years old. I'm finding out the hard way that playoffs aren't easy. It's better to find out now than it is to find out at 30.”
What has gone wrong? Only a few days ago, Price was the Cinderella story of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs, the rookie kid who was handed the most important political office in Montreal and had performed so brilliantly fans were dreaming of a 25th Stanley Cup.
But then disaster struck.
Hints of struggling against the Boston Bruins in the first round and now two losses in a row in the second, with a Monday outing so weak that he was yanked after two periods and replaced with backup Jaroslav Halak.
“Pucks have eyes right now, it seems like,” Price said slowly. “They were hitting me for the first four games against Boston – and suddenly just started finding their way to the back of the net.”
His coach, Guy Carbonneau, agreed with a suggestion after the third game that his young goaltending star seemed “rattled.” Price used the word, but only to deny he and his teammates – for so goes a goalie goes the team in playoff hockey – are “going to get rattled” by the pressures of tonight's critical match.
What does he feel Carbonneau will do? “I imagine I'm starting,” he said.
And this, at the moment, is the all-consuming question. Price has been letting in bad goals. Halak, on the other hand, came in for the third period and played shutout hockey.
He did, however, face but two shots.
Carbonneau would not tip his hand. Veteran practice and morning-skate observers learn to watch the goaltenders to determine who is playing. The first one off the ice is, almost invariably, the one starting.
This day, they left practice at the same time. “They'll sleep at the same time,” Carbonneau said jokingly. “Eat at the same time.”
All the coach would say about the rookie goaltender in the future was, “I'm sure he'll be back.”
But when? Tonight? The fifth game if Halak cannot do it?
The majority opinion is clear: You put him back in. You do not tamper with the psychological well-being of what has been designated Montreal's franchise goaltender. You live with him, or you die with him.
The minority opinion is held by the likes of former Canadiens coach Jacques Demers, who led Montreal to its last Stanley Cup, in 1993.
“If I have a veteran goaltender,” Demers said. “I take the kid out and rest him for this game. It's only one game. You will still have another.
“The kid is going to be great. If I leave him in, I may do more harm to him than if I sit him. This kid is going to be a great one for years to come, but he's lost four out of his last six games and you have to wonder if the rest wouldn't be good at this point.”
There is some thought that Price is simply worn down. Last year, the B.C. native won gold in the world juniors and won the Calder Cup in Hamilton and now he is finishing his first season in the NHL years before most goaltenders arrive. He is only 20.
“I don't think age matters in this league,” Philadelphia goaltender Martin Biron said. What does matter is confidence.
“We get a few bounces like we've had,” Flyers forward Mike Richards told The Canadian Press, “I'm sure it rattled his confidence a little. But I would expect not to see the Carey Price we've seen the last couple of games.
“He's going to bounce back – and you know he's going to come up with one of his best games.”
Price thinks he is fine. He'd prefer not to dwell on the losses and the bad goals. “Sometimes,” he said, “you've just got to put it in a jar and put it away.”
His teammates, obviously, are convinced he's fine to go. “Pricey doesn't get rattled by much,” defenceman Mike Komisarek said.
What the Canadiens have to do, Komisarek said, is “create some chaos” in front of Biron's net just as the Flyers have in front of Price.
“He's just one guy,” the big defenceman said of his young goaltender. “He's not going to win us a game. He's not going to score.”
Perhaps not score, but in playoff hockey, goaltenders do win games for teams.
In hockey lexicon, it's called stealing.
And either Montreal – regardless of which goaltender is in net – steals a game soon or else Philadelphia is going to rob Montreal of the Canadiens' best chance in 15 years.
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