The Montreal Canadiens have set aside November 10 for Carey Price, but the team’s announcement stops short of saying his number will someday join the rafters.
That date will be Price celebration night at the Bell Centre, ahead of a game against the Minnesota Wild. The timing lines up neatly with another major milestone: Price has been selected for the Hockey Hall of Fame in his second year of eligibility and will be inducted on Monday, November 9. As the Canadiens did for former captain Shea Weber, they plan to honor Price with an on-ice ceremony and add him to the Bell Centre’s Ring of Honor.
That part matters. The Ring of Honour, created in October 2008, is reserved for members of the organization who have reached the Hall.
Price will be added to a group that already includes Weber (2024), Pierre Turgeon (2023) and Guy Carbonneau (2019). And just because the club didn’t mention a number retirement doesn’t mean that door is closed forever.
The two honors are separate. Patrick Roy is proof of that: his number 33 was retired on November 22, 2008, and he is also in the Ring of Honour.
Still, the Canadiens do not rush these decisions. Roy left the NHL after the 2002-03 season and waited five years before his banner went up, 13 years after his ugly exit from the organization.
Guy Lapointe had to wait until 2014 for his number 5 to be retired, even though he stopped playing after the 1983-84 season. That was a 30-year wait.
Yes, 5 was already hanging up there in tribute to Bernard “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, but the point remains: until the banner is raised, the number is not retired.
Price’s case is still fresh enough that the debate is wide open. His NHL contract only ended at the end of the season, and he held a retirement weekend celebration this summer without making an official retirement announcement. He last played in April 2022, just four years ago, so the discussion over whether his jersey belongs in the rafters is hardly settled.
The main argument against it is simple: he never won a Stanley Cup. For some, that matters more than anything else, especially when Canadiens legends such as Jacques Lemaire, Steve Shutt and Guy Carbonneau have already been given that honor despite their Cup totals.
But that standard gets messy fast. Montreal has not won the Cup since 1993, and in a 32-team league, the title is harder to grab than ever.
And winning a Cup does not automatically make someone the defining figure in team history. Lemaire and Shutt were part of championship teams, but they were not the central reasons those teams won.
They had Guy Lafleur, Ken Dryden and Serge Savard beside them.
Price’s résumé is built on something different: he was the franchise’s backbone for 15 seasons. He finished with 361 wins, the most by any Canadiens goaltender, nearly 50 more than Jacques Plante’s 314 and 72 more than Patrick Roy’s 289.
He ended his career with a 2.51 goals-against average, a .917 save percentage and 49 shutouts. Roy, by comparison, posted a 2.78 GAA with Montreal, a .904 save percentage and 29 shutouts.
And beyond the numbers, Price carried the team through some very lean years. Without his presence and his level of play, the Canadiens would have had even less to lean on over the last two decades.
He won the Hart, Ted Lindsey, Vezina, William M. Jennings and Bill Masterton trophies, and NHL player polls repeatedly named him the hardest goalie to play against.
He did all of that while playing behind an offense that offered very little help. The most gifted scorer he shared the ice with was Alexei Kovalev, who had 84 points in 2007-08, Price’s first NHL season, and 65 the following year, his last with the Canadiens. After that, only Tomas Plekanec and Max Domi reached 70 points or more in a season during Price’s tenure.
Maybe Price would have won a Cup if he had played behind the current Canadiens core. What the organization gave him instead was a thin offense and the expectation that he could drag them to the finish line anyway.
He could not deliver a championship, but that hardly erases what he meant to the franchise. He gave everything he had, bled red, white and blue for 15 seasons, and was more than the face of the Canadiens.
He was the heart of them, too.
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Montembeault is also in the final year of his contract, which adds to the intrigue around his future. After a rough statistical season, he still profiles as the type of goalie a team in Columbus's position could examine if it wants stability or insurance, and Montreal would have to at least consider whether this is the right moment to explore value. No trade has been confirmed, but the fit is obvious enough that this is now one of those situations worth watching closely. [Read more 🡒]