Montreal Goalie Carey Price Re-Aggravates Injury
The Montreal Canadiens are once again without starting goalie Carey Price. Price re-aggravated the lower body injury that kept him out for nine games earlier this month. The injury occured in the second period of Montreal’s 5-1 victory over the New York Rangers on Wednesday night. Price’s leg appeared to bend awkwardly on the ice and shortly thereafter the goalie conferred with team training personnel during a timeout. The switch was made during the second period intermission and rookie backup Mike Condon took over for the third period.
Price will be out at least a week though it could be longer based on comments from Canadiens’ staff. For the time being, however, Mike Condon will be back in the starting role. He did a good job during Price’s earlier absence with a 5-2-2 record. Overall this season, the 24 year old Massachusetts native is 7-2-2 with a 2.16 goals against average and a 0.916 save percentage. In addition, Dustin Tokarski has been recalled from the St. John’s IceCaps of the AHL to provide backup for Condon. Montreal head coach Michel Therrian wasn’t ready to speculate how long they’d be without Price: “We don’t know how long Carey will be out, but for us, it’s business as usual. We’re focusing on tomorrow’s game.”
Condon says he’s ready and that he got mentally prepared before the team gave him the word that he’d be replacing Price against the Rangers: “Goalies know how goalies move, and you can tell when a guy obviously isn’t 100 percent or something happened and he got hit. I saw what happened and started getting my mind mentally ready. You’ve always got to be ready at the drop of a hat, because you never know when that moment can come.”
Condon performed well during his last stint in the starting role but appeared to wear down near the end of his run. His new strategy: “Have a short memory, focus on the things that matter. It doesn’t matter about the game you played before, it just matters about being in the moment. Whether it’s a bad goal or a nice save, you’ve got to move on to the next one because there’s a lot of games to be played.”