How Badly Will Carey Price's Injury Absence Hurt the Montreal Canadiens?

Carey Price, the defending Hart Trophy winner, the best player on the team, which as of this writing sits first overall in the NHL standings, is an awfully hard player to replace. With injury sidelining him for the next six weeks, the question isn’t whether his absence will hurt the Montreal Canadiens.

The question is: How much it will hurt?

The answer to that question will be dictated for the most part by the play of backup goalie Mike Condon. Shortly after Montreal announced the extent of Price’s injury, the team recalled rookie pro Zach Fucale from the AHL. That decision moves nominal No. 3 goalie Dustin Tokarski to the minors, where he’ll get a chance to get some playing time in.

Habs coach Michel Therrien stressed that it was important to get Tokarski some game action at the minor-league level:

Therrien’s comment about Fucale is suggestive; those aren’t the words of a coach who expects his team’s latest call-up to get a lot of playing time. For the moment, that leaves Condon as the club’s undisputed No. 1 goaltender.

This isn’t the first time this season that Condon has fallen into this role. Price missed the first three weeks of November, came back and played three games, and then was shelved again. During his absence, Condon played all but a single period, going 5-2-2 with a 0.904 save percentage during that span.

That save percentage is a little concerning, but it’s probably a bad idea to isolate just that nine-game run. On the year, Condon is 8-2-3 with a 0.916 save percentage.

Derek Leung/Getty Images

A season ago, Condon went 23-19-6 with Hamilton of the AHL, posting a 0.921 save percentage. While it’s hard to predict NHL performance for goalies using AHL numbers, back in 2012 Stephan Cooper of SB Nation did a study and found that the normal save percentage drop for a player moving from the AHL to the NHL was seven points.

If that holds true in Condon’s case, we’d expect him to have an NHL save percentage around the 0.914 mark—almost bang-on with what he’s done as a rookie.

In contrast, Price had a 0.934 save percentage at the time of his injury, in line with the 0.933 number he posted last year. He’s a career 0.920 save percentage goalie but has out-performed that mark for three years running, with a 0.931 save percentage average since the start of 2013-14.

The trick here is simply to compare Condon’s expected performance against Price’s benchmark. We also need to factor in the expected drop-off from having Condon as a backup to having Tokarski (career 0.906 NHL save percentage), who will likely be recalled for the No. 2 job after he gets in some AHL time.

Over the next six weeks, Montreal will play 18 games, including four sets of back-to-back games. If we go with coaching convention, that means 14 starts for the Canadiens’ No. 1 goalie and four starts for the backup. Montreal allows an average of 29 shots against per game, which works out to 406 shots against the starter and 116 shots against the backup.

Expected	Proj. Shots	Proj. SV%	Proj. GA
Actual	Proj. Shots	Proj. SV%	Proj. GA
1. Carey Price	406	0.931	28
2. Mike Condon	116	0.914	10
Tandem	522	0.927	38
1. Mike Condon	406	0.914	35
2. Dustin Tokarski	116	0.906	11
Tandem	522	0.912	46

Using our save percentage estimate and our expected shots-against totals, we get an expected gap of eight goals during the 18-game period that Montreal should be without Price. Using the numbers generated by Eric Tulsky, Carolina Hurricanes analyst and former Broad Street Hockey writer, (full analysis here; it’s really straight-forward and well worth reading) we know that on average a drop of three goals is equal to one point in the NHL standings. Without Price, we’d expect Montreal to lose three points over this 18-game span.

That’s a massive gap over a full season, but given Montreal’s sizable lead on the rest of its division and the relatively short period of time under consideration here, it’s not a major blow. The Canadiens are 10 points up on Ottawa as of this writing; even without Price they aren’t in much danger of losing that lead if Condon can provide even serviceable play in the interim.

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com, Hockey-Reference.com and war-on-ice.com.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.