This is going to be a loooooooooong year.

I think the laffs will finish 8th-10th in the conference…

The Habs certainly have a way of making Marty Biron look like an elite goaltender.

Umm, doomsayer? The Habs will make the playoffs. I just hope that they do more than that.

Yes, bored out of my mind. I can’t even tune in for a full 60 minutes. There are much better things to do than watch a team that doesn’t play to win.

Yeah, I’m not sure if the culture of the dressing room hasn’t changed for the worse. The Katstitsyn brothers are playing absolutely terribly–no fight, no creativity, no opportunism. The defense is disgraceful, in part because the forwards are up the ice so far, and working so little, that there’s no puck support for the D. Latendresse had his first good shift of the year last night.

I’m glad that the guys aren’t worried about it yet. At least the death is painless. But my problem isn’t with their losses, it’s with the complete lack of effort that they’ve showed in all but two or three games this year. I mean, if you’re just squeaking by with wins in games that you should win easily, eventually it’s going to catch up with you. So here we go: a 3-2 SO victory over the worst team in the league, followed by a 2-1 loss–and brutally out-shot–to a mediocre team.

I have missed maybe 5 Habs games on TV over the last 3 years (one of them was the third period of the comeback against the rangers), but I’m not just mad at losing when I say that I’ve been having a hard time this year, even when they were winning, bringing myself to sit down and watch a full Habs game. It’s like nobody on the first 3 lines of this team is fighting for anything–not their jobs, not the win, certainly not the Stanley Cup. Ah well.

Something is wrong with this team that we don’t know about.

Nice post and name, Mats Naslund. I remember watching them last year and thinking “how are these guys this good?” I watch them this year and I have yet to wonder the same thing more than, maybe, 3 times?

But it’s not about winning and losing. I’ve seen them lose games where, at the end of the game, you sit back and think: “wow the other team was lucky, b/c the Habs played better”. I think of the Buffalo game at the start of the year, which was a good game. But lately, they’ve just been getting out-worked by the other teams–not just in the games that they lost, but I think also of those games (against Toronto, Boston and the Islanders, earlier in the year) where they should have lost, but squeaked-out a win.

I agree with you, though. Keep the lines and let them play through adversity. I also agree that it’s better to slump now than later, but I wonder if this “slump” isn’t more than a “slump”, maybe a fundamental lack of chemistry on a brand new team that has frankly not yet played well enough for long enough to call a down-slide a “slump”. They’ve had more bad games than good games, despite the record.

every team has a slump every single year. no doubt.
the positive way we canm look at ours is that is happening NOW.. and not in may or aprill.. thank god