Price First Star

Carey Price was named the first star of the week, beating out Nikolai Khabibulin and Jaromir Jagr.

Please note the press release clearly contains a typo. It reads October 31st, 2011 when it should state 2001. Silly to think an editor missed this, Jagr would be 39 in 2011 and Nikolai would nearly be 39 too. They'd both be on Tobalev's hockey pool team...


Diaz to share accolade


Carey will surely acknowledge his whole team in discussing the honour, but special thought to Raphael Diaz with whom he switched positions for a few minutes in the game before last.


Plekanec can stuff it



Plekanec, on the other hand may receive special extra mention as the faceoff "specialist" who seemed to be on Khabibulin's side in this race for late October honours.


Did the people who make these choices watch these games, by the way? Silly question, of course they didn't.

If they had, I would ask them if they'd ever had such hilarious highlights in a first star's video montage before...

Carey Price Recognized For Sensational Week

We've been waiting for Carey Price to step up and answer Jaroslav Halak for some time. When Jaro came in to the net, he usually left a window for the replaced starter. There were times when Carey answered, but it has rarely been as emphatic as this.

Now, a couple of weeks after Jaro Halak was setting the chatlines alight with his NHL recognized work in October, Carey has answered with a first star nod from the NHL.

There's not much I can say that will speak louder than the statistics, so I'll just lay some of those out for you.


This is what you know already. 3 wins, a shutout, and some pretty heady numbers.



Broken down by period, you can see his success in a different way. Last season, there were no shutouts, and not all that many shutout periods either. 7 shutout periods, including the pivotal three shutout third periods allowed his team to reel in the victories.



Finally, some extra stats from the stats that I keep kicking around. His profile by chances on net (scoring chances with misses and blocked shots removed). You can see it's still extremely heady numbers here. Even more so when you account for the fact that good in scoring chance world is in the 0.800's.

The other two stats show shots before a goal was allowed (SBG) and the save percentage based on that number (starting save percentage). It's difficult for goalies to come in and put up high numbers consistently right from the start of a game, 0.952 is just about as good as it gets.




All in all, a good week for Carey. He certainly headed off any challengers for the next Molson Cup, and will probably wrap up the season title any day now at this rate.