Succeeding a legendary goalkeeper is generally not a smooth process. Especially in a market like Montreal, especially for a local athlete on top of that.
Jocelyn Thibault could attest to this. Thibault was not a bad goalkeeper, but he was acquired in a direct trade with Patrick Roy and he was asked at 21, 22 years old, to replace a giant. He was treated unfairly by the crowd and the media and a divorce became inevitable after a few seasons for the psychological balance of this nice boy.
This winter, Carey Price’s successor is being deployed without anyone realizing it. And he is from Quebec. With another splendid performance on Saturday, this time against the Edmonton Oilers, Samuel Montembeault, 27, improved his record to 9-6-4, lowered his average to 2.89 and raised his save percentage to .909 .
When he’s not in net, Montreal is 8-12-3. And allows on average 3.33 goals per game. In his last 15 starts, Montembeault has allowed more than three goals only three times. And never more than four goals.
Everything is obviously a question of context. Samuel Montembeault was not obtained by the Canadian in his early 20s against Carey Price. He did not win a Stanley Cup with his new team. And the most recent Cup in Montreal is not just two years old.
Montembeault was obtained on waivers during training camp in October 2021, when Carey Price had just entered the NHL assistance program. Little did we know that Price would be able to play only five games at the end of the season before his knee forced him to stop playing for good.
This young 24-year-old goalie from Bécancour, stuck behind Sergei Bobrovsky and Spencer Knight with the Florida Panthers, had to act as an auxiliary to Jake Allen while waiting for Price to return. And let Cayden Primeau, still green at 22, continue his apprenticeship in the American League.
The head coach of the Laval Rocket, Jean-François Houle, knew him well having led him in the junior ranks with the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada. Logically, he was going to finish the season there, unless he was repatriated by the Panthers.
We used four goalies behind the team’s new number one, Jake Allen, that year. Besides Montembeault and Primeau, Andrew Hammond, nicknamed The Hamburglarduring his short but famous hour of glory in Ottawa, even came as reinforcements in March 2022.
Montembeault concluded this season marked by the dismissals of Marc Bergevin and coach Dominique Ducharme with terrible statistics: 8-16-6 record, 3.77 average and a save percentage of .891. But the team was downright bad and he showed enough resilience to survive the regime change and get the backup job to Jake Allen the following season.
Since the start of the 2022 season, he will have had the chance to fight against Jake Allen and not against the ghost of Carey Price, unlike Thibault at the time with Patrick Roy.
This boy never stopped progressing. His participation last spring in the World Championship with the Canadian team, where he maintained a 6-1 record, with an average of 1.42 and a save percentage of .939, allowed him to sit even more its credibility.
So here we are in January 2024. Montembeault has become the indisputable number one, ahead of Primeau and Allen. He has played five of the last seven games despite a menage a trois. He will begin the first year of a three-year contract next year at an annual salary of 3.1 million. The agreement will end in July 2027. He will be 30 years old.
So, without warning, Carey Price’s successor was found. Not his equal, obviously, but a reliable and efficient number one goalkeeper. And the more good performances from him one after the other, the more skeptics can withdraw the expression waiting. Samuel Montembeault will not be number one waiting Primeau, Jacob Fowler, Jakub Dobes or Yevgeni Volokhin. These young men will have to fight to take his position away from him.
At the time of Marc Bergevin’s dismissal in November 2021, Samuel Montembeault was considered a temporary lifeline. Three and a half years later, it will be one of the best moves of the Bergevin era…
Jonathan Drouin is having a blast
PHOTO DAVID ZALUBOWSKI, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Jonathan Drouin
Jonathan Drouin comes to Montreal on Monday evening with eight points in his last six games, sixteen in his last fifteen. He constitutes the third piece of the most formidable trio in the NHL, completed by Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen. These three are used to excess, as explained by Guillaume Lefrançois, present at Avalanche training on Sunday at the Bell Centre.
Drouin has played 20 minutes or more in his last seven games, with games of 28:16 against Boston and 25:02 against Toronto. He now has 24 points in 41 games, after collecting just eight in his first 26 games.
Marc Bergevin dreamed of this Jonathan Drouin when he sacrificed his best hope on defense, Mikhail Sergachev, to get him in June 2017.
No need to rip our shirt off here. Hockey players are not robots, but flesh-and-blood human beings, with sometimes fragile souls, sensitive to certain environments. And there is the context too. Playing with Nathan MacKinnon, his former teammate in the junior ranks, increases his chances of success more than with Christian Dvorak or Jake Evans, for example.
The Avalanche took a low-risk gamble by offering him $825,000 for one year. He gets an extraordinary return on his investment. And how can we not be happy for Drouin?