Tampa Bay can win its second straight N.H.L. championship on Monday night with a four-game sweep of Montreal unless the Canadiens goalie can repeat his success from earlier in the playoffs.
Reasonable minds can disagree here, but: The most scrutinized position in sports just might be the starting goaltender in Montreal, where praise and criticism and comparisons to legends are doled out by the minute, in two languages, without so much as a break for lunch. Jacques Plante lived this life, and so did Ken Dryden, and so did Patrick Roy, and so have so many others, and so, too, has Carey Price, who has played more games with the Canadiens than them all, and more seasons. Beneath the Coupe Stanley banners that they helped raise but he has not, Price skated onto the ice Friday for the first Cup finals game in Montreal in nearly three decades to a rousing ovation at Bell Centre. He skated off about two-and-a-half hours later, after a 6-3 defeat to Tampa Bay, ever further from adding his name to the only trophy that has eluded him, and the only one that matters. All three games of the finals have ended the same way, with Tampa Bay scoring more goals than Montreal, and though there are other, nuanced reasons that explain why the Lightning are on the precipice of winning their second consecutive Cup in nine months, a prevailing one is rather unfamiliar to the Canadiens: They have the inferior goalie. “I can definitely play better,” Price said afterward. “It’s just not good enough so far.” Until Friday night, Price had not been made available to the news media since last Sunday, the day before the series started, when his responses in sum contained roughly as many syllables as goals allowed this series. That total now stands at 13, or eight more than allowed by his Lightning counterpart, Andrei Vasilevskiy, who has faced 18 more shots than Price at even strength, but has saved a far higher percentage in those circumstances (.
