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Freezing Cold Take: Carey Price’s “save of the season” was going to be blocked anyway
I almost didn’t want to write this one. I have enough going on right now—quarantine, apartment hunting, no Big Ten football—without a mob of angry Habs fans molotoving my inbox. But joke’s on them, I don’t read French. So here goes nothing: Carey Price’s incredible, cat-like save-of-the-season shoe-in on Wednesday was actually, if you look at it closely, pretty pointless. Sure, sure, it looks good for ‘gram, but watch it again. Carey Price doesn’t save this shot as much as he saves Nick Suzuki, who was like 92% going to block it anyway. This is not going to be a popular opinion with the tendie union, but somebody has to say it.
Puck physics are a fickle mistress, of course. Maybe this skips off Suzuki’s back, wild west ricochets off the underside of the crossbar and goes in. Maybe it caroms off him and the defenseman trailing the play jams it home. But both of those scenarios are far less likely than Suzuki simply taking a bruise for the boys.
So can it really be considered the “save of the season” if it was getting blocked anyway? Does it even matter in a losing effort? (The Flyers would go on to win 2-1.) Big questions that will divide hockey fans for years to come. But we will say this: Context is everything, and I’m sitting on my couch 600 miles from Toronto. If I’m locked in a soundproof room with Carey, then it’s 1000% a save, 10 times out of 10, please and thank you, sir.
Seriously, don’t f—k with goalies. They aren’t right in the head.