This is the kind of season it’s been for Carey Price.

You might be wondering how he ended up like this Tuesday night. Well, it required a screened point shot, a tip in front, an unlucky bounce to a great scorer, and an attempted post-lean that never quite connected:

Many of the goals scored on the Canadiens this season have had the same make up: a series of misplays or unfortunate events leads to a tricky situation where Price doesn’t exactly falter, but also doesn’t seem to maximize his chances at making the save. An accumulation of such goals has made life miserable for the Habs.

The Canadiens have been dominating play and outshooting their opponents convincingly through six games to start this season; they have a meagre three points to show for it, along with an awful minus-12 goal differential. The can’t-score narrative that plagued them last season has once again been a problem, but their poor standing has been compounded by an unexpected weakness: Carey Price is struggling. With a raw save percentage of .885 and a goals against average of 3.45, both ranking 41st in the league, Price is sinking into very unfamiliar territory.

Before we go any further, a warning: it’s only been six games. It makes no sense to lament Price’s lavish new eight-year, $84 million contract, or despair that he’s suddenly become the team’s Achilles heel. In all likelihood, Price’s numbers will rebound as his body of work for the season expands. The goal here isn’t to predict Price’s future: it’s to describe what factors have led to his poor start.

The statistical story

One of the most challenging aspects of goalie analysis is disentangling the team’s contribution to defensive results from the goaltender’s. A useful place to begin is with a heatmap, showing where the Canadiens allow their shots against from. Here is Price’s from this season (excluding the game against the Sharks on Tuesday):

All heatmaps courtesy Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath) via hockeyviz.com

The deep blue area in the low slot is a good sign for team defence: it indicates the Canadiens are giving up far fewer shots from this high-danger area than an average team. There’s a little concerning red to the left and right of the goal, but the left patch is on too poor an angle to be a prime scoring location, and the right one is small and not very intensely coloured (meaning the number of shots given up from there is higher than league average, but not greatly so). To put this in some context, compare it to Price’s heatmap from last season, set alongside Cam Talbot’s:

The colours are more muted because values tend to diverge less from the median as a season’s worth of shots get taken. Despite this difference, we can see that Price is facing a similar distribution of shots from scoring areas, arguably better for him so far this year than last (mostly because of the red oval in the middle of the slot for 2016-17). Looking at Talbot’s heatmap, we can see how much worse it could be for Price. Relatively speaking, the team is doing a good job of limiting shots from dangerous areas. We’ll have to look deeper.

Corsica Hockey (source for all statistics presented here, excluding Tuesday night’s game) uses shot type, location, and situation to determine the likelihood of a given shot being stopped. Summing these enables them to determine what we should expect a goaltender’s save percentage to be. It’s essentially a measure of the ease or difficulty of the shots a goalie faces.

Price’s expected save percentage at 5-on-5 is a very respectable .916. This indicates that the difficulty level of shots he faces is about average: in this regard, the team is doing its job in front of him.

Price’s actual save percentage at five-on-five is .878, well below expectation. This may not seem like a lot, but in a league where the spread between replacement-level and elite is less than three percentage points, it’s a massive shortfall. This piece of evidence points to Price as the source of the Habs’ inflated goals against average.

Sometimes a goaltender has solid results when playing 5-on-5 but suffers from a poorly planned or executed team penalty kill. This can make his overall numbers and performance look bad through little fault of his own.

For Price so far this year, that’s not the case. With an .875 save percentage while shorthanded, it is actually very comparable to his numbers at even strength. Price has not been victimized by a poor penalty kill.

We can break down Price’s shots against even further by looking at how he has done against low, medium, and high-danger shots, defined mainly by location, but also including other variables like whether the shot came off the rush or a rebound. A goaltender allowing a high number of goals on low-danger shots, for instance, would be faulted far more than a goaltender allowing the same number of goals on as many high-danger shots.

So far, Price has been perfect on low-danger shots. This isn’t all that impressive, as goaltenders seldom dip below 97 percent success in that category, but it does indicate that Price hasn’t been allowing long-range stinkers to sink the team.

Far more concerning are Price’s success rates on medium and high-danger shots. Price was right around league average last season, stopping 91.8 percent of medium-danger shots. So far this year, that number is a wilting 81.5 percent. Price’s impressive 87.7 high-danger save percentage last season stands mountainously tall over this season’s shrunken 73.9 percent success rate.

Such diminished success in the medium and (especially) high-danger zones fits the perception of Price’s goals against we started with: Price doesn’t exactly falter, but also doesn’t seem to maximize his chances at making the save. Because the goals are coming off good chances, it feels wrong to lay blame on the goaltender: that being said, when it happens often enough, the sense that “he has to come up with a big save or two” starts to creep in. This is exactly where we are with Carey Price.

The visual story

First, it’s important to acknowledge the role that blind puck luck can play in destroying a goalie’s numbers this early in the season, with so few shots taken. And if it weren’t for bad luck, the Canadiens would have no luck at all. For instance:

Price is in good position on the post and wisely tries to poke the pass away from its intended recipient. He gets just a piece of it on the way through, which, unluckily, causes it to hit his defenceman Shea Weber’s skate, which, unluckily, directs it off the goal post, which, unluckily, deflects it into the net. If you rewound and redid this moment 1000 times, this chain of events likely wouldn’t happen again.

Moving beyond luck, there have been no glaring weaknesses in Price’s game. However, there have been some minor problems that have contributed to the sense that Price isn’t quite playing to the level we’re used to seeing, and they were apparent even on opening night:

The first goal against of the season was a well-executed play by the Sabres, but Price wasn’t quite on point. He begins by making the reasonable assumption that the pass recipient (Jason Pominville) will take a quick one-timer on the forehand. At that point, Price starts to move into the butterfly, getting ready to slide into the path of the shot.

Pominville has so much space he craftily declines the one-timer, and instead carries the puck on his backhand side. Price is down in good butterfly position to stop the one-timer that never came, but is now behind the play. His goal is to regain the angle line (the imaginary line running from the middle of the net to the puck).

Price’s slide, never intended to carry him across the net, has him well behind the shooter. At this point Price has to make a decision: he can push again while on his knees to try to catch up with the play; he can recover to his feet and shuffle over; he can recover to his feet and simply set for the shot.

Price chooses option three, which leaves him as far from the angle-line as possible. He covers more net standing than in butterfly, and being set and still is better than being in motion when the shot comes. However, Price is so far off his angle that the rest is moot: a skilled player has too much net to shoot at.

Again, Price makes no massive error here, but slightly misplays a situation he normally handles much better. He’s been caught over and under-committing more than usual this season, to his detriment.

Another area where Price usually excels is his netback and post play. At times this season, however, he’s looked uncharacteristically out of his element.

Once again, we have a beautifully executed play where full credit has to be given to the scoring team. Nonetheless, a minor error by Price plays a role in the goal. He begins following the puck with good visual attachment (he has a clear line of sight, eyes on the puck).

Then, the mistake: goalies are usually taught to follow the puck over one shoulder for as long as possible. When the puck is moving out of your field of vision behind the net, the first step is to shuffle off your post, enabling you to maintain visual attachment for longer. Then, once the puck has crossed the midline of the net, quickly head switch to follow it as it comes out the other side. Price head switches early, before shuffling over, and before the puck has crossed the midline.

The pass gets made back against the grain, but Price is now looking the other way. The shooter Mika Zibanejad has the puck ready to fire by the time Price comes to the horrible realization that the puck must be above the goal line to his right. From that position, scoring is almost inevitable.

Every goaltender has stretches where the crispness of their game falters: they just seem especially bad when they come at the start of the season. So long as the goaltender is psychologically resilient and patient, some goalie coach time for technical work will eventually right the listing ship.

(Photo credit: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)