Price Reaches the Hall of Fame
Carey Price is about to join the Hockey Hall of Fame, and the Canadiens’ weekend in Toronto ended up being part of the celebration. Price received his Hall of Fame ring in the Great Hall on Saturday afternoon, and a few hours later the Canadiens beat the Maple Leafs 4-2 at Scotiabank Arena. The induction itself is Monday night, November 9, in Toronto, where Price goes in with the Class of 2026. One night later, on Tuesday, November 10, the Canadiens will honour him at the Bell Centre before the game against the Minnesota Wild and add his name to the Ring of Honour.
The numbers explain why. In 15 seasons Price played 712 games for Montreal and won 361 of them, the most by any goalie in franchise history, with 49 shutouts, a 2.51 goals-against average and a .917 save percentage. In 2014-15 he won 44 games with a 1.96 GAA, a .933 save percentage and nine shutouts, and he took home the Hart, Vezina, Ted Lindsay and Jennings trophies. He won Olympic gold with Canada in 2014 and carried a team that was never built to score all the way to the 2021 Stanley Cup Final. We told the full story in our Carey Price Hall of Fame feature, and Monday night is the last chapter.
A Franchise Built on Great Goalies
The Canadiens have always been a goaltending franchise, and Price is the latest name in a line that starts with Jacques Plante and runs through Ken Dryden and Patrick Roy. Every era had a goalie who defined it.
Jacques Plante built the template. From 1952 to 1963 he played 556 games for Montreal and won 314 of them, with 58 shutouts, a 2.22 GAA and a .920 save percentage. He was in net for five straight Stanley Cups from 1956 to 1960, won six Vezina Trophies with the Canadiens and the Hart Trophy in 1961-62. In November 1959 he put on a mask after taking a puck to the face and kept wearing it, which changed the position for every goalie who came after him.
Ken Dryden arrived almost out of nowhere. He played six regular-season games in 1970-71, then led the Canadiens to the Stanley Cup that spring and won the Conn Smythe Trophy before he was even a full-time NHLer. He won the Calder the next year and finished his career with 258 wins in 397 games, only 57 losses, 46 shutouts, a 2.24 GAA and a .922 save percentage, five Vezina Trophies (three of them shared) and six Stanley Cups in eight seasons. He sat out 1973-74 over a contract dispute, came back, and retired at 31 after the 1978-79 season.
Patrick Roy brought the next generation of big moments. As a 20-year-old rookie in 1986 he won the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy, and in 1993 he did it again, including ten straight overtime wins in the playoffs. Over 551 games with Montreal he won 289, with 29 shutouts, a 2.78 GAA, a .904 save percentage and three Vezina Trophies. Those numbers look different from the others because the league of the late 1980s scored far more. He left after a 12-1 home loss to Detroit on December 2, 1995, and was traded to Colorado four days later.
He has already collected some hardware. The NHL named Fowler its Rookie of the Month for October, and he also won the Canadiens’ Molson Cup for October, the club’s monthly award based on three-star points. In October he went 7-1-0 and stopped 205 of 220 shots (.932).
Then came Price, and now Jacob Fowler. The Canadiens drafted Fowler in the third round, 69th overall, in 2023. Last season he went 19-7 with a 2.23 GAA and a .916 save percentage in 27 games for the Laval Rocket and played one game in Montreal. This season, in 10 starts, he is 8-1-1 with a 2.15 GAA, a .925 save percentage and two shutouts. Here is how the five goalies compare in a Canadiens sweater:
| Goalie | With Montreal | Hall of Fame | GP | W | SO | GAA | SV% | Cups with MTL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jacques Plante | 1952–63 | 1978 | 556 | 314 | 58 | 2.22 | .920 | 5 (1956–60) |
| Ken Dryden | 1970–79 | 1983 | 397 | 258 | 46 | 2.24 | .922 | 6 |
| Patrick Roy | 1984–95 | 2006 | 551 | 289 | 29 | 2.78 | .904 | 2 |
| Carey Price | 2007–22 | 2026 | 712 | 361 | 49 | 2.51 | .917 | 0 |
| Jacob Fowler (2026-27 so far) | 2025–now | – | 10 | 8 | 2 | 2.15 | .925 | – |
These are regular-season numbers with the Canadiens only. The eras are very different, so the table shows the workload and the results, not a ranking.
Why the Price Comparison Keeps Coming Up
Price was asked about Fowler again and again over the Hall of Fame weekend, and then Fowler gave everyone more to talk about. He stopped 26 of 28 shots (.929) against Toronto, and by one expected-goals model the Leafs created about 3.6 goals worth of chances, so he saved roughly one and a half goals more than the average goalie would have. That is a big night for any goalie. For a 21-year-old coming off a bad loss, it is more than that.
From a coach’s point of view, the comparison is easy to understand. Fowler gets to his spot before the shot is released, he stays square to the shooter, and the puck hits his body and stops. There are no big rebounds in the dangerous areas. Price saw the same thing earlier this season: when he was asked about a save Fowler made at the Heritage Classic in Winnipeg, sliding across to absorb a Mark Scheifele one-timer on the power play, he recognized it right away and said Fowler reads the play really well and has instinct. On Saturday, with Toronto pushing late in the third period, Fowler turned away a William Nylander slap shot and then a Jack Roslovic shot, and both looked routine.
He was just as honest about the one that got through. Nylander’s power-play goal at 6:19 of the third period made it 3-1, and Fowler said afterward he was not happy with it. The penalty kill is built to take away the far post and give the goalie the short side, and Fowler held himself to that deal: the short side is his job. That is the kind of ownership you hear from goalies who play for a long time.
Price also knows how heavy a comparison like this can be. When he was young, he was compared to Patrick Roy.
Fowler’s Mindset: Calm After the Storm
To understand Saturday you have to go back to Tuesday. Against the Jets the Canadiens blew a 4-0 lead and lost 5-4 in overtime, and Fowler faced 47 shots and stopped 42 of them (.894). Four days later Montreal was up 3-0 early in the third period when Arber Xhekaj took an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty at 4:40. Nylander scored on the power play at 6:19, and Toronto’s second goal came 55 seconds later, at 7:14, to make it 3-2. A young goalie could easily have started to think about Tuesday.
Fowler did the opposite. At the television timeout after the second goal, he went to the bench and told his teammates there was no reason to panic and that the team was going to be fine. He is the youngest goalie in the NHL, and he was the one calming the room. Nick Suzuki said that Price carried an aura and that when he spoke, the whole team knew it had to listen. Suzuki was talking about Price, but it describes what Fowler did at that moment. Bolduc scored on the power play at 12:15 to make it 4-2, and Fowler made the saves he had to make down the stretch.
His explanation was simple. Once something is over, it is in the past, and you cannot live there. After Tuesday he felt he made a couple of poor decisions based on where the game was, so on Saturday he just wanted to play one shot at a time and stay in the moment. In coaching terms, he is controlling the part of the emotion he can control. Over his last five starts he has stopped 172 of 184 shots (.935), and he has earned a point in nine straight starts, going 8-0-1.
Fowler Does Not Need to Be Price
When Price was asked what advice he would give Fowler, he did not talk about technique. He said Fowler is himself and does not need to be anything else, that he does not need to be Price or Roy, and that the most important thing is to block out the noise and focus on the job in front of him. He also said he loves watching Fowler play because of how quiet his game is.
We agree, and so does Fowler’s own game. He is a 6-foot-1, 223-pound left-handed goalie who made 46 saves for a shutout against a heavy workload on October 27 and another shutout on October 10. When he talks about Price, he sounds like a fan: he said hearing the praise this weekend made him feel like a little kid who used to watch him. He also said that when he thinks about the organization, goaltending comes first, and that wearing the logo every day is something he does not take for granted.
The best thing Canadiens fans can do is the same thing Price asked for. Enjoy the comparison, but do not hand a 21-year-old a Hall of Fame résumé. Let Fowler build his own.
Too Early to Say, but the Ingredients Are There
It is too early to say that Fowler will become another great goalie in Canadiens history, and nobody should say it after ten starts. What we can say is that his talent, his skills and his mindset give him a real chance to become a great goalie in the NHL. Very few goalies show up in the league at 21 years old. Of the 75 goalies who have played this season, Fowler is the youngest, and the next youngest, Sergei Murashov in Pittsburgh, was born in April 2004. You need to be exceptional to do that.
The Canadiens know what it looks like when it works. Roy won a Stanley Cup at 20, and Price was a 20-year-old rookie. That does not mean Fowler is Roy or Price, and he does not have to be. It means that the best goalies this franchise ever had did not wait long to show who they were, and Fowler is showing us who he is. Next, the Canadiens honour Price on Tuesday night at the Bell Centre against the Wild.
Sources: official NHL statistics, game data and NHL.com, Hockey-Reference, MoneyPuck and The Athletic.
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