Goalie matchup: Canadiens-Bruins

Baker counters: Carey Price spends so much time under a microscope in Montreal you'd think he was more of a lab experiment than a goaltender.
 
Aptly, Price's season did start off as something of an experiment. You had GM Pierre Gauthier's then-unproven hypothesis that Price was the better franchise goalie for the Habs than Jaroslav Halak, the fan favorite whom he let go. At the time, the Habs hordes feared their GM was a mad scientist.
 
Less than a year later, after a Vezina-contending season in which he has put up the best numbers of his young career, Price has made Gauthier look less like Dr. Frankenstein and more like Dr. Einstein.
 
Positionally, Price plays with poise -- and at the core of his mindful presence is a stance that perfectly combines just deep enough of a crouch with the right amount of upper-body erectness.
 
But while his stance serves as the cornerstone of his textbook-sound play, it's just one piece to the much-improved puzzle that has been Price. Gone is the gangly goalie of his first couple seasons, when he was definitely fun to watch dive and dash, but was about as consistently good as a group of Molson-swilling singers at a Quebec karaoke bar.

Indeed, the new Price is right -- more pucks are hitting him because of his squared-off positioning.
 
The series matchup with Thomas will be a study in contrasts. Price's sleek, youthful, modernly conventional game is the yin to Thomas' old-school yang of drop, flop and roll. Given that Thomas is 13 years older than Price, one might think their opposing styles would be reversed, with Thomas being the calm Mr. Miagi to Price's erratic Kid.

But despite what Gauthier's experimenting might have you believe, Price and Thomas remind us that goaltending remains just as much of an art as a science.