How often have we said this year “The Canadiens played well enough to win.” It’s a sad song that’s heard ad nauseum since the season began.

Fact is, the Canadiens again played well enough to win in Colorado Wednesday night win except one thing. They can’t score goals. Forty-three shots on goal and nothing. Zilch. Shut out!

If you can’t be good, at least don’t be dull. Especially don’t be dull in front of your own fans.

And the Canadiens have been anything but boring in their last three home games even knowing that their season is a failure destined to end in Toronto April 7th.

You can carp about the Canadiens long-standing inability to capitalize on their scoring chances but it’s impossible to question their effort against Nashville Saturday night.

For Artturi Lehkonen it hasn’t been the dreaded ‘sophomore jinx’ that caused him to go 24 games without a goal, so much as an untimely injury. Lehkonen scored his first two goals of the season on October 30th at Ottawa. Two weeks later he suffered a lower body injury (knee?) that kept him out of 16 games and put his conditioning well behind the rest of the league. It is only in the last couple of weeks that there has been some of te old jump to his game and Sunday he finally got on the same page as his teammates. Lehkonen scored two goals including the game winner and came within a whisker of completing the hattrick late in the third period.

There is a long list of things the Canadiens front office is going to have to deal with when the team’s season ends on the seventh of April. The power play is not one of them. As a matter of face the Canadiens power play is one of the few areas that has improved as the season has gone along.

It’s become clear since the Christmas break that the Canadiens are closer in talent to the teams behind them in the standings than they are among those who are just a ahead of them. That may make happy those who favour going into the tank through the final thirty-one games but it’s depressing the hard core fans to no end.

It’s become the never-ending story. Against Carolina Thursday night, a lot of individual hard work failed to produce a goal. I

It wasn’t dull. Sloppy yes. Dull no.

Coaches spend hours drilling systems, puck management and discipline into their teams and then stand back and watch everything they’ve been preaching come off the rails.

This was one of those nights. Alfonse and Gaston could have been playing this game. Or Abbott and Costello. Maybe Fric and Frac.

It was clear two minutes into the game what the Canadiens wanted to do against a team that was on it’s second game in 24 hours. Starting with two hard hits by Brendan Gallagher on the first shift, they piled on seven in the first four minutes.  Execution was near perfect.  They kept up the hitting.  The classic way to beat a road-weary hockey team.  At the end the hits favoured the Canadiens 43-23 and ended Colorado’s ten game winning streak.

You have to hand it to the Canadiens. Saturday night’s game against the Bruins was their second in 24 hours, their third game in four nights and their fifth in eight nights. And unlike in Boston on Wednesday, the Canadiens showed up and worked hard for sixty minutes.

We are warned “never to look a gift horse in the mouth” and for some reason the Friday night version of the Washington Capitals was “a gift horse” for the Canadiens. The Capitals were playing their second game in 24 hours coming off their five day break. Whatever the reason, the Friday night Capitals were a shadow of the team that whipped the Canadiens 6-1 in early October and the Canadiens are not going to give back the two points.

To start the game against the hottest team in the NHL on Wednesday night the Canadiens centremen were Jacob de la Rose, Paul Byron, Tomas Plekanec and Byron Froese. The most qualified member of that group was Plekanec and he went into the game with one goal in his last 28 games.

So could anyone expect any different result?

It started well. The Canadiens scored in the first minute. After that, mostly downhill.

Things started well – a goal in the first minute. Then it was mostly downhill with the exception of Carey Price who kept it pretty close until the third period.