It seems a reasonable question to ask at this point: Where would the Montreal Canadiens be without Carey Price?

The correct answer is nowhere that's charted on any known map or GPS. The judges will also accept "out of the playoffs and in line for a lottery pick at the draft."

The sexy choice for the Vezina Trophy at the mid-season All-Star break is Nashville Predators netminder Pekka Rinne, who led regular starters in save percentage and basically everything else before going down to a minor knee injury last week.

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Fair enough, the brain is with the Finn, but the guts say Price should be leading the race, not just for the Vezina but perhaps also for the Hart Trophy as league MVP.

Under normal circumstances it's dangerously simplistic to pin credit or blame on the guy in the pads. These are not normal circumstances.

Consider this: The Rinne-less Preds, second in the NHL's overall standings, were at the Bell Centre on Tuesday and dominated Montreal, which has the fourth-most wins in the league, to the tune of 24 shots to four over the first period-and-a-half.

Read that number again.

The home team, fresh off a morale-boosting win over those Eastern Conference monsters, the New York Islanders, on the weekend – Price missed the game with an unspecified upper-body injury – went nearly a full period between shots on goal at one point (18:28).

And yet there was Price, calmly repelling shot after shot, 36 in total. (Montreal would eventually win 2-1 in overtime on a P.K. Subban power-play goal.)

His first test came within the opening two minutes when Nashville's Mike Fisher bulled around and through Montreal defender Nathan Beaulieu and tried to stuff the puck into the net; Price shot out his right leg, pinball paddle-style, to stop it.

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High blood pressure surely isn't a problem the 27-year-old native of Anahim Lake, B.C., needs to worry about. A few moments later he laconically gathered a puck beside his net as a pair of Predators zoned in and batted it over to a defenceman.

It's become a habit for Canadiens players to say it's unfair for them to expect their goalie to save their bacon night after night, sometimes there are glimpses that they actually mean it.

Tuesday's example was 20-year-old forward Alex Galchenyuk roaring back from two zones away to thwart an incipient four-on-one.

The Predators are the league's stingiest defensive team this season – they had allowed an NHL-best 99 goals going into the game – and the magnificent Rinne gets his share of the credit for that.

On the strength of this showing, however, Nashville is far from a one-man outfit.

Coach Peter Laviolette has them playing a stifling, pressing system – they had the Habs, who typically hold their own at even-strength, thoroughly befuddled – and the club has an abundant supply of character and grit, as measured by their 13-0-0 record this season after losses.

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It was the Habs' hard luck that Nashville had lost its last game, Saturday in Detroit.

While Price is a hard puzzle to solve, he could do little to stop the Preds' 26th shot of the game, a sizzling Seth Jones point shot that caromed off Mike Ribeiro's stick. The Habs will find it galling the Montreal-born alumnus found the score-sheet, although moments earlier he had bunted a puck past an open net, and Price lost his stick in the subsequent chaos.

In fairness, the score should have been much more lopsided by then.

Having a world-beating hole card like Price creates the space for the Habs to gain points from games they have no business being in, there was a sense of inevitability when defenceman P.K. Subban, great this night, drew a penalty in the opening minute of the third.

On the ensuing power play, Subban's blast from the point was tipped past Nashville goalie Carter Hutton by Galchenyuk.

Price's mantra is that all he wants is to give his team a shot at winning. That he does.

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He is known to care not a jot about personal honours – his mind is on the trophy awarded in June – but if he continues playing like this, there could be one in his future. Perhaps even two.