This is what it is.
There is no sugarcoating what the Canadiens are going through this season. They have five wins in 22 games, and only the Arizona Coyotes — who are intentionally bad — and the Ottawa Senators — who aren’t — have a worse points percentage than the Canadiens after Friday night’s 4-1 loss in Buffalo to the Sabres.
The Canadiens shouldn’t be this bad. The talent on this team is perhaps not at a playoff-contending level, but it is not at a league-basement level, either.
Under normal circumstances, the coach would pay the price for a season like this. I firmly believe Dominique Ducharme is a smart hockey mind. He is a good coach. But he has been unable to coach this team, this particular group of players, and it is painfully obvious. It must be obvious to Ducharme himself, deep down inside.
You can talk about your team’s lack of execution night after night until you are blue in the face, but until you realize that what you are asking your team to do is partly to blame for the lack of execution, you won’t get anywhere. Except Ducharme has seemingly not done that, not had that self-evaluation that he asks of his own young players, because he continues to ask them to execute the same system, one they have continually demonstrated this season that they are unable to execute.
This is the same coach who brought the Canadiens to the Stanley Cup final last season, and he is coaching the same system that brought them there. But this is not the same team.
