Montreal – October 24, 2022
Montreal Canadiens star goaltender Carey Price isn’t planning to retire – but!
Things for Montreal Canadiens star goal tender, Carey Price, have been pretty rough since he lead his team to the Stanley Cup finals in 2021. Price and the Cinderella Habs lost the series and the following off-season, would lose both captain Shea Weber and star goalie Carey Price to surgeries needed to repair injuries the pair carried with them along their magical playoff run. Weber has yet to play since then, and isn’t expecting to ever dress for his current team, the Vegas Golden Knights.
For Price, the journey has been different – yet eerily similar in many ways. Price’s surgery didn’t go as expected and the recovery too has been rife with issues. Price originally underwent surgery in July 2021, to repair a torn meniscus and was scheduled to miss three months as he recovered. But a series of setbacks have continued to keep him away from the game. Today, Carey Price and General Manager Kent Hughes today held a press conference to that while Carey Price isn’t planning on retiring – he isn’t optimistic about a return either.
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Price, 35, returned at the tail end of the regular season last year to play the final five games of the season but says he still isn’t fully comfortable. He stated that his most recent surgery “hasn’t been successful” and would required yet another procedure to have hopes at returning to the sport. However, the surgery he would need only has a success rate of fifty percent, which obviously isn’t enticing.
“The surgery is called OATS,” Price said. “Basically, they’re taking a plug of cartilage and bone from a lower area in your knee and placing it in the cartilage-damaged area. It’s pretty serious and from a pessimistic perspective it’s like, ‘Well, there’s 50 per cent chance that it could not work.”
“We’ll have to take it step by step. I don’t have a plan to retire right at this moment,” Price said. “Right now, my goal is to just be pain-free from day to day. I’m still having some issues getting up and down stairs and carrying my kids up and down stairs is difficult. So my first priority is just to get my body in a place where I’m pain-free in my day-to-day living and go from there.”
Obviously, Price’s health and family life is far more important than the sport he has excelled in since being drafted fifth overall by the Montreal Canadiens in 2005. Price was a stand-out while with the Tri-City Americans, as he was with the Hamilton Bulldogs of the AHL, where he helped the Bulldogs win a Calder Cup. Price made the Canadiens roster for the 2007–08 season as the backup goaltender before ultimately becoming the starting goaltender later that season. In 2015, he won the Ted Lindsay, Jennings, Vezina, and Hart trophies, becoming the first goaltender in NHL history to win all four individual awards in the same season.
Internationally, Price has represented Canada at various tournaments at junior levels, winning silver medals at the World U-17 Hockey Challenge in 2004 and the IIHF World U18 Championship in 2005. He won a gold medal at the 2007 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships in Sweden. In 2014, Price was named to the Canadian Olympic Hockey Team and won a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Price’s play also earned him the tournament’s top goaltending award, from the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) directorate. In 2016, Price went undefeated to win his first World Cup of Hockey championship.
“It’s something, unless I was in dire need of to get through my life, that maybe I would consider at that point but right now I’m looking at my young kids and to play with them day to day is the most important thing for me.”
“That’s been the real frustrating part but I’ve talked to several people that had this type of injury and it’s taken over a year for them to start feeling normal,” Price said. “So I’m still holding out hope. There’s a possibility of another injection but we’ll have to see. We just have to continue trying to solve a problem but that surgery is a bit worrisome for me.”
Read More:
>> Carey Price unlikely to play this season
>> Canadiens sign Kirby Dach to a four year, $13.5M deal
>> Sean Monahan traded to the Montreal Canadiens
Meanwhile, Habs rookie Juraj Slafkovsky has undergone more tests on an upper-body injury that kept him out of the line-up against the Dallas Stars the game after the first overall pick at last year’s NHL draft scored his first NHL goal. It is likely that the injury will also keep him out of the lineup against the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday. Slafkovsky took a hit from Josh Brown moments before ripping a wrist shot past Arizona Coyotes netminder Connor Ingram at the Bell Center on October 20th.
Rem Pitlick, who replaced Slafkovsky versus the Dallas Stars is likely to remain in the line-up should Slafkovsky not be able to play. Should that be the case, Pitlick will dress against the team from which the Montreal Canadiens claimed him off waivers from when the Minnesota Wild visit the Bell Center in Montreal.
