Carey Price entered the Hockey Hall of Fame on Monday night after 712 games, all of them for the Montreal Canadiens. Hall plaques almost always lead with the clubs a player represented.
His doesn’t.
The plaque in the Hall of Legends in Toronto opens instead with a single line: a member of the Ulkatcho First Nation in B.C.
Price grew up in Anahim Lake, a community of a few hundred people roughly 300 kilometres west of Williams Lake, and has never treated it as a footnote.
“It’s pretty cool to have an area that you’ve represented for years,” Price told The Athletic. “I still view myself as being an Anahim Laker even if I don’t live there anymore. I just think it’s important to be proud of yourself and your heritage, and to have goals and give everything you have to achieve them.”
Carey Price’s NHL career:
| Games | Save percentage | Olympic gold | Stanley Cup Final |
|---|---|---|---|
| 712 | .917 | 2014 | 2021 |
Where is Carey Price from?
Only eight players born in British Columbia have ever reached the Hall of Fame, and Price is the second goaltender among them after Tiny Thompson of Sandon, who went in back in 1959. His own corner of the province is Anahim Lake, in the Chilcotin region, and the route out of it is part of why the plaque reads the way it does.
His background came into public focus during Montreal’s run to the 2021 Final, which coincided with Canada’s reckoning over the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Price wrote about it himself the previous year, describing his maternal grandmother as a residential school survivor.
“The mistreatment and misplacement of First Nations peoples in America and Canada has echoed generations of poverty and substance abuse. These facts must also be brought to light,” he wrote. “In our house we will not see the color of your skin but the character of your heart.”
That same grandmother features in the story of how he found out.
“I was on my way to go visit my grandmother at the hospital. Hockey Hall of Fame came up on my caller ID in my truck, so I was pretty excited about that,” Price said. “Got to spend the rest of the day with my grandmother, who made a recovery. It was a blessed day.”
He went in alongside Patrice Bergeron, Keith Tkachuk, Pekka Rinne, Cindy Curley and Brian Burke, with his wife Angela and their three children in the room.
The family traveled to Montreal straight afterwards. Price’s name goes up in the rafters at the Bell Centre on Tuesday, alongside every other Hall of Famer connected to the club.
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