Where the Montreal Canadiens went wrong (Trending Topics)

You've all seen the stat by now: No one in the league has fewer points since the beginning of December than Montreal, and no one is even all that close.

The Habs are in a tailspin the likes of which we don't often see even from the worst teams in the NHL, let alone those that blazed out of the starting gate and had one of the best records in the league for a while there. This is a team that finished with 110 points last season, and only got bounced out of the second round because it played the second-best club in the league. It has a number of marquee players at every position. It had even seemingly fixed the cracks that many people saw in the foundation of its success last season.

So the question, then, is simple: What went so pear-shaped that this went from a dominant team to a pushover seemingly overnight?

You're never going to believe what the answer is.

Are you ready?

It's percentages!

And you'd have to say that they're mostly talent-driven on top of that!

Because remember that thing about how the Habs aren't any good at all since the start of December? Let's try to find statistical areas where that is actually the case:

Look at that, the only difference here is that their shooting and save percentages cratered at 5-on-5. If we're going to examine the reasons why this losing run is happening, the analysis really does begin and end there. And again, a lot of that issue seems to be related to injuries, rather than runs of good or bad luck.

The team is effectively not doing very much differently, when judging things on an events-per-60 basis. Contrary to what a lot of people have discussed, this is not a team that can be accused of playing more conservatively knowing that the guy behind them is someone other than Carey Price.

After a score adjustment, their offensive zone time is effectively unchanged, but they're getting hemmed into the D zone a bit more. Both high-danger chances for and against are up, but the increase in “for” is larger than “against” on a proportional basis (increases of more than 14 percent versus less than 7 percent). Shots on goal numbers are effectively also unchanged: both shots-for and shots-against are down 0.2 per 60.

You can say what you want about what Therrien was doing as a coach last season, but in a lot of very meaningful ways he's made Montreal one of the better clubs in the league this time around. That's unchanged despite the losing run.

Let's put it this way: The Canadiens have been absolutely annihilated goal-wise at 5-on-5 for almost two months (29 for and 46 against), and they're currently at minus-1 for the whole season. That's how badly things have gone, but also the kind of position in which they should find themselves, all things being equal.

Now you might say it doesn't matter because this is a results-oriented business, and you're probably right about that. Therrien has to be feeling some pretty significant pressure to pull out of this, because his team went from the top of the division, with a 10-point cushion(!), on Nov. 30 all the way down to fifth in the division, one point out of even a playoff spot, just seven weeks later.

But as bad as things have been lately, the fact that the process has been there all along to some extent. The Habs are still playing with fire to some extent, insofar as Michel Therrien's in-zone schemes necessarily require that his team does something with the puck few others in the league do, just lofting it out of the zone and letting the attacking team regroup and try again.

“Dump-outs” like that are a problem. They lead to icings, which leads to tired legs that you can't change without burning a timeout (a problem since you only get one per game), and that doesn't help your goals-against department either. Especially when you don't have the goaltending provided by Carey Price behind you.

Which is is, of course, the titanosaur in the room. The fact that reigning MVP Carey Price has checked into just 12 games this season, having missed three weeks in November, coming back for three games in which he was spectacular, and then not played again since Nov. 25, is effectively what is killing the Canadiens. Montreal has lost just two of his 12 appearances, because he has a .934 save percentage, which is actually a point better than what he did last year to win the MVP.

Almost any goalie on earth is going to be a step down from Price, of course, and for a while Mike Condon looked very, very good. In his first eight appearances this year, some of which were in the immediate wake of the first Price injury, he was actually .936. No one thought that was going to last, and indeed it hasn't. Since those first eight starts (in which Montreal went 6-0-2), he's been an .895 goalie, and that's probably the best the Habs' backups have had to offer this season. Which is telling. Condon was in the ECHL as recently as 2013-14, so you have to legitimately wonder how much of a hope this team ever had of reasonably replacing Price at all.

We have plenty of evidence at this point that Marc Bergevin is a shrewd GM, and one wonders if he adopted something of a “grin and bear it” attitude hoping he would get replacement-level goaltending from Condon and Dustin Tokarski. When it didn't work, he made a low-stakes trade for Ben Scrivens, and that also has not worked. And at some point, you just run out of goaltending options, and probably can't justify trading for another netminder on top of the four you've already used this season.

As pointed out by Travis Yost, what smart coaches like Bruce Boudreau do when the going gets tough in this regard is find other ways to make things work. Therrien has done little besides hope everything works out for the best, and while the process is now clearly solid in both theory and actual practice, it might also be something worth tinkering with.

That does not, however, account for the roughly 36 percent drop in shooting percentage. Some of that, too, you can say is the result of the prolonged absence of Brendan Gallagher demonstrably hurt the Habs' offense for more than a month.

When a player of his quality — and given his hot streak to start the year — misses more than a third of your season to date, that's going to hurt you in the goals department.

But certainly not that bad. It is clear that the Habs have been unlucky in the shooting department even after accounting for losing Gallagher, who had 9-10-19 in 22 games to start the year and 2-3-5 in eight since returning. They have just 29 goals despite amassing almost 210 high-quality scoring chances at full strength in the last 22 games (a really good number!) and that kid of fallow pace is simply not going to last.

The problem, to some extent, is that the start to the season set some unrealistic expectations of what the Canadiens “are” in terms of their actual quality, and perhaps even what kind of coaching acumen Therrien brings to the table. It's arguable that a team this well-constructed should be performing better than it already is in terms of the process at 5-on-5, that a better coach would get better results with the Canadiens as currently constituted.

There are, consequently, two different sets of good news and bad news.

For those who feel Therrien and/or Bergevin need to shake things up, the unfortunate news is the coach probably hasn't done enough to get himself canned, especially given the leeway any coach would be due when the best goalie in the league is out for 35 of 47 games and a nearly point-a-game forward misses 17.

The good news, if you want to view it that way, is that the leeway is probably vanishing rapidly.

And the good news if you're a Therrien supporter is that in theory the ship rights itself if you just stay the course, because as long as you're getting more possession time, more shots on goal, and more high-quality chances than your opponents, you're going to win more games.

The bad news is staying the course might run you into some rocks before you get a chance to pick up the tailwinds and start cruising again.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via War on Ice unless otherwise stated.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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