What We Learned: Braden Holtby, Carey Price not getting the attention

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

Filling out a mid-season awards ballot the other day took a little bit of research, and when I got to the Vezina category it was a slam dunk.

Devan Dubnyk, man. Still far and away the best goalie in the league at .940, which is amazing. He would have to eat it big-time in the second half to not be in the final three at the end of the season. With that having been said, we’ve seen Dubnyk eat it big-time before, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility, especially considering that no one gets this kind of workload and stays that high in save percentage.

People are obviously also talking about Sergei Bobrovsky, and for good reason. One of the biggest workhorses in the league, huge reason Columbus is winning, and so on. Seems that being healthy is really all he needs to be a top goaltender at this point, so that’s all well and good too.

After that opinions seem to divided as to who the other guy in the Vezina conversation should be. Five Puck Daddy writers, all of whom watch the league a lot as you might imagine, settled on three non-Dubnyk, non-Bobrovsky goaltenders for awards picks. Tuukka Rask, who’s having a low-key strong season for Boston and like Bobrovsky and Dubnyk has played in the vast majority of the team’s games (for lack of any half-decent backup options), is rightly getting some consideration.

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But the other two vote-getters were extremely interesting: Braden Holtby finished third in our voting, and Carey Price was fourth. These are two of the biggest-name goalies in the league, playing in strong markets and getting lots of national TV time each month.

They are having two very different seasons. You can see it in their 10-game average save percentages:

One of the things I don’t think has been talked about enough in the past few months is that the Canadiens keep winning — they’re 10-6-4 since the start of December, a pace for 98 points, which isn’t bad — despite the fact that Price’s game has completely collapsed. Over that same stretch, Price went a horrible .892, so for the team to emerge with that many wins with one of the best goalies in the world playing like one of the worst is incredible.

The local media recently categorized it as a “mini-slump” but clearly that isn’t the case if it’s gone on for a month and a half. The idea that Montreal is better so Price being elite isn’t a necessity for winning is absolutely well-founded. I was saying last year that Michel Therrien didn’t get enough credit for turning that team’s process around and making them a reliably good club despite the bad goaltending they got in Price’s lengthy absence.

That holds up, but now it’s Price who’s playing badly enough to be costing the team wins on a regular basis. If you have a player like this on your roster, his presence isn’t something you should have to overcome.

Price started out incredibly hot (some might say unsustainably so!) with save percentages of .954 and .944 in October and November, respectively. And that was after a World Cup in which he went .957 — in only five games, to be fair — against some of the best talent in the world. The collapse is a big surprise, of course. This is the guy who won the Vezina and Hart with a .933 for a rotten team just two years ago. And besides, he has half a season to pull out of it.

Or not. Because if you take a step back and consider the workload Price has received from the Canadiens, who obviously need him operating at peak performance, you do have to wonder if he perhaps took on too much too soon in the wake of an injury that basically cost him an entire season. Because of the World Cup his season started earlier than it normally would have, and he’s on pace to play about 3,500 minutes for Montreal this season, which is a lot. He might even see that pace pick up when the games start “mattering more.”

Frankly, I’d be a little worried about it.

Because statistically he’s just been on a slow but steady decline for the entire season. No periods of prolonged steady play, just a few brief upticks here and there that don’t really disrupt the slope too much. And what’s interesting is this slope is seen on both low- and high-danger shots he’s faced this season, the latter much more pronounced. Early in the year Price was stopping more than 90 percent of high-danger shots on goal, which as you might imagine is incredible. Over the last 20 games or so he’s been closer to 80 percent, which is in the same neighborhood as what Cam Ward has delivered in Carolina this season. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s also not elite-level performance, or even close to it.

If the Canadiens are going to be any good at all the rest of the way, they need Price to either turn his play around or hope they can keep winning without his help. The latter seems unlikely to say the least; if you’re getting .900 goaltending over a half-season your chances to be meaningfully competitive evaporate quickly. Price is obviously totally capable of just becoming a .930 goalie again, but that he’s just trended in the wrong direction all year.

So while Price is getting well-earned slack from many in the media — how much longer that lasts remains to be seen — Holtby is quietly improving on his Vezina-winning season a year ago.

Of course, he didn’t actually deserve that Vezina, but he had the Wins voters love, so he got the award. For context, he went .922 last season (eighth in the league) and won the award that should have gone to one of Corey Crawford, Cory Schneider, or Ben Bishop instead. This year he’s .930, and he’s getting kind of cursory attention for it. Doesn’t help that the Caps are the second-best and third-place team in their own division, with the media darling Blue Jackets and reigning champ Penguins hogging a lot of the attention they might otherwise get.

But not only has Holtby dominated this season, he’s been slowly getting better as the season chugs along. His high-danger save percentage has been consistently above-average, as has his medium- and low-danger number. He hasn’t allowed a low-danger goal since early December, in fact.

If Holtby continues on this path, and gets a couple bounces to go against Bobrovsky and Dubnyk, he might just become the first back-to-back Vezina winner since Martin Brodeur almost a decade ago. The quality of his play really should be getting more attention.

Maybe it will if he keeps it up.

What We Learned

Anaheim Ducks: Yo, no kidding.

Arizona Coyotes: Shane Doan would accept a trade, and the Coyotes are like, “Finally!”

Boston Bruins: My boy has done it again. Marchand now leads the Bruins in points and there’s a gap of 10 between him and second-place David Pastrnak.

Buffalo Sabres: It’s almost like their depth is terrible and that makes it impossible to play a competitive full 60. Hmm. Hmmmmmm.

Calgary Flames: Starting to look like the Flames really don’t want that playoff spot after all. Losers of four of their last six, with the Ls coming against Vancouver, Winnipeg, New Jersey, and Edmonton.

Carolina Hurricanes: The Hurricanes, meanwhile, just keep on rolling.

Chicago: This is, indeed, the proper reaction when you lose by a touchdown:

Colorado Avalanche: I wonder if anyone has been saying this for years. Probably no one who is so handsome and smart in hockey and, say, has a column where they say one thing about every team every week 52 weeks a year.

Columbus Blue Jackets: Columbus has also lost four of their last six. Isn’t that so weird?

Dallas Stars: In my opinion you’re gonna want to not give up three goals on the first three shots you face.

Detroit Red Wings: Maybe now Jared Coreau is the next Detroit goalie we think is really great until he isn’t.

Edmonton Oilers: Patrick Maroon is having some kind of season. Which is good because Milan Lucic has been horrible.

Florida Panthers: Two of the Blue Jackets’ five losses since late November are against Florida. Fun quirk.

Los Angeles Kings: Jeff Carter just keeps scoring, huh? I guess someone has to for this team.

Minnesota Wild: In a league where guys punch each other in the face with bare knuckles in every other game, the thing we really need to crack down on is fake mascot violence.

Montreal Canadiens: Get this guy out of the goddamn league.

Nashville Predators: For some reason, I get the feeling that Cody McLeod isn’t going to fix what’s wrong with the Predators.

New Jersey Devils: Hey, okay now.

New York Islanders: Their trade deadline strategy should be “pleading with John Tavares.”

New York Rangers: I love that we’re gonna start blaming Lundqvist for this stuff. Even if he’s directly at fault, all the playoff appearances this team has made for years are solely because he exists and therefore maybe my man just gets a free pass for life.

Ottawa Senators: This seems like a headline that portends a good future..

Philadelphia Flyers: This is my favorite thing now:

Pittsburgh Penguins: Even in losses Mike Sullivan sounds very smart.

San Jose Sharks: This would be cool.

St. Louis Blues: Man what is going on with the Blues’ goaltending situation here?

Tampa Bay Lightning: I’m still a little surprised, to be honest, that this happened before a Vinny Lecavalier number retirement. But it definitely rules.

Toronto Maple Leafs: Whoa, only “a little?”

Vancouver Canucks: Yeah “the fans” are definitely a reason why the Canucks appear to be decent now but in fact are still bad. Makes a lot of sense.

Vegas Golden Knights: Some nice mumbo jumbo-y stuff about how George McPhee is a good general manager.

Washington Capitals: Boy we aren’t talking enough about this Caps streak, by the way. What an excellent team they have here.

Winnipeg Jets: Man, you gotta fire the coach. Good lord this isn’t hard.

Play of the Weekend

This goal was good. The roughly 800 blow assignments by Pittsburgh not so much.

Gold Star Award

Brad Marchand with five points and I love it, folks.

Minus of the Weekend

With no more circus from Ringling Brothers, what will Chicago beat writers complain about every year?

Perfect HFBoards Trade Proposal of the Year

User “JetsHomer” is that.

Trouba for Gostisbehere straight up

Signoff

No no, cursive handwriting. Script.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)

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