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“Just changing the attitude is not going to be good enough,” Bergevin added. “I just want to make that clear. But bringing other players with the same attitude is not going to be good, either. So we need to start with that and add other pieces to put this back on track.”
Fast-forward three years and the Canadiens are once again talking about attitude.
“It’s about attitude,” head coach Claude Julien said Monday, a day after the Canadiens lost 3-2 in OT to the Ottawa Senators, the worst team in the NHL. “The only thing you control right now is your attitude. So you either come in down and discouraged or you come in determined and wanting to turn things around and ready to do those kind of things. So that’s one thing we can control. Sometimes there’s bounces, there’s all kind of things that happen in a game that you can’t always control. But your attitude and your approach is something that can make a big difference, so that’s what we’ve got to do.”
Julien was hoping for an attitude adjustment Tuesday night, but the Canadiens ended up losing again to the Senators — this time 5-4 in a shootout. The Canadiens are now 2-4-2 in their last eight games and 9-5-4 for the season.
A bad attitude certainly doesn’t help a hockey team, but neither does an offence that had scored only 13 goals in seven games before Tuesday night’s shootout loss. Neither does a power play that ranks 20th in the NHL (18.2 per cent), captain Shea Weber being minus-1 for the season, goalie Carey Price having a 2.95 goals-against average and a .893 save percentage, and Tomas Tatar — the team’s leading scorer last season — being made a healthy scratch for one game and being benched for the last eight minutes of the third period and the full OT Sunday. There’s also that 3-5 home record at the Bell Centre.
Teams are built down the middle, so when you only have eight goals from your four centremen through the first 18 games — including none from veteran Phillip Danault — that’s a really big problem.
Every team goes through a slump during an NHL season and there’s time for the Canadiens to get back on track, but the clock is ticking much faster during this condensed 56-game season.
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