Wreckless
Joined: Sep. 2020
Posts: 3,361
Likes: 438
I have a HUGE amount of respect for your opinions.
Carey Price has been average, at best, during many of his performances this season. I agree.
But do we really think he’s not going to return to his all world form?
Do we really take a day where there’s been a coaching change (because the whole team has been playing poorly) to ponder if Price will resemble an aging Lundqvist? Because of a sample size of 11 regular season games? When the team overall has also been poor recently?
Price was all world last postseason, as he has been most of his career. To the point that Anderson, Toffoli, Edmundson, etc. all chose to sign here long term? Do most elite goaltenders stop being good at 33? 34? 35?
Our defense was solid to start the season and the team was winning. If I had to point to one event, Victor Mete’s agent shot his mouth off speaking (erroneously) for Bergevin about what was “in the best interest of the team” before being refuted directly that he was not going to trade him, and that it’s not an agent’s place to say what’s in the best interest of the team.
The error here, in my opinion, was with Julien for playing Mete. Julien broke up the Romanov Kulak pairing, and I’d argue that neither Romanov, nor Kulak, nor the rest of our D, nor Carey Price, nor our forward group as a whole, have been as good since.
Ironically, when Ferris said that it would be in the best interest of the team to work together to find a trade, despite being wrong for speaking about what the team was going to do, he might have been right that trading a malcontent is better for team cohesion than keeping him (especially when you choose to play him when you’d probably be better off continuing to sit him).
It’ll be interesting to see what Ducharme does with Mete. If I had to bet though, I imagine the coaching change alone will be enough to light a fire into Price and we should see both him, and the rest of the team, back at the top of their potential in short order.