Once more, with feeling:

Jaroslav Halak is better than Carey Price.
But you knew that didn't you?

Yes yes, the kid's more talented, has more potential, etc etc. But last night still brings home a very important fact: Price was not ready to play in the NHL last year. And because he was rushed, he STILL is not ready. Bob Gainey, who has this aura of patience and intelligence, inexplicably acted like a rabid video-game-playing fanboy when he bought into the hype surrounding this supposed Third Coming of Holy Goaltending and Montreal's Sacred Right to the Stanley Cup.

He seemed to forget that in the real world, miracles are rare, and young kids don't carry their teams to Cup championships just because they wear the same uniform past legends wore. If I were to put on a roach, breastplate, dance bustle, and paint my face, it would not make me any more Sioux than I am now (zero). Carey Price is not Patrick Roy or Ken Dryden. No amount of dressing him in their colors and hoping he could replicate their exploits would make it so.

I've already written at length about Gainey's stubborn inability to recognize last year's opportunity for a Cup run. Going hand-in-hand with that is how Gainey tried to push this kid before he was ready, and did not give him the support of some additional trade-deadline players.

So now the damage is done. Gainey has kept riding Price as far as he could take him, and the result is, not very far. Halak keeps proving himself more capable, but Gainey still chooses the kid instead.

Now, pundits are asking, just how fucked up will this kid be? Will he turn into the next Alexander Daigle? Does Jim Carey ring a bell? I have premonitions of watching the NHL network in 20 years and seeing them do a program on the talented young kid named Carey Price, who was brought into the NHL far too early, had far too many expectations laid at his feet, was thrown into a team whose management refused to bring in the necessary personnel, was fucked up by a Butterfly-enamored goalie coach, who therefore got burned out, bounced around the league going up and down from the AHL, and finally found his niche as a tolerable backup. I see Carey Price being the next Felix Potvin.

And it will be all Bob Gainey's fault.