When a coach gets fired, all the mean things people say about the job he did in the weeks before he got his walking papers are couched with, “You never want to see a guy get fired, but...”

Which is strange. There aren't too many other professions for which this kind of thing is said.

“You never want to see a guy get fired, but that crane operator has shown up to work drunk and on sleeping pills every day for the last two weeks.”

“You never want to see a guy get fired, but that lawyer keeps taking naps when he's supposed to be cross-examining a witness.”

“You never want to see a guy get fired, but that janitor has been holding his broom upside down for a month.”

And in the case of Habs coach Michel Therrien, the thing you now have to say is, “You never want to see a guy fired, but that coach gave Douglas Murray at least 18 and a half minutes in each of the last three games.”

And that's as scathing an indictment as one could level against an NHL coach, on the level with a janitorial worker who doesn't know the bristly side is the one you're supposed to put on the floor. At some point, you have to just say, “Here's a guy who doesn't deserve to have his job any more.”

Not that overusing an indisputably awful player — even in so hilarious a way as this one — in and of itself should be enough to get one fired, but this is very much indicative of how sideways things have gone for Therrien and the Habs in the last three weeks or so, during which time they've gone 4-6-2, and allowed 49 goals in those 12 games and scored just 30. That includes 19 against and only five for in the last four.

It's tough to say, exactly, why the Habs have been just so bad lately. Their defensive wherewithal seems to have completely gone away, they never have the puck any more, and the losses are piling up in embarrassing fashion. Saturday's humiliating home loss to the Capitals should have been the last straw; the Habs put their third shot on goal at 12:47 of the first period, and then didn't get another one until 12:44 of the second. At that point, it was already 4-0 Washington, and the Canadiens had four shots. Total. In 32:44. They didn't get their fifth until a little less than three minutes after that, which is to say that any sustained offense didn't really show up until the team was already in a cavernous hole.

It must be said that one can't act on four or five or even 10 games worth of bad results and say that a coach has to go. Any particularly ugly 10-game stretch, for instance, might not be enough evidence to show that changing a coach can turn anything around. But for the Habs, who have now slipped below the Toronto Maple Leafs in the standings, this is no sudden problem; they've been trending this way for months.

(And lest anyone think this is another rehashing of the Winnipeg Jets' firing of Claude Noel, which was not in and of itself undue but rather mistreatment of the problem, please keep this in mind: The Jets started bad and leveled off at “sub-mediocre.” The Habs have been moving down through and past bad for months, suggesting not stagnation but actual worsening.)

Opponents have been getting progressively closer to the net as the defense falls completely apart and allows more and more shots on the transition, and Carey Price's by-month save percentage has consequently slipped by 50 points on from October to January. Maybe this was always going to happen given the way the Habs blue line was very much slapped together in this offseason, but the results are beginning to speak very loud, and fairly clear.

Montreal blog Habs Eyes on the Prize recently compared the way the team has trended since the start of the season to the way the 2008-09 Penguins performed in terms of even-strength shot attempts, and the results are shockingly similar. After being at around plus-48 in this regard after Game 10, they've slipped to close to minus-276, which is a hell of an accomplishment over just 42 games. The trend lines between this and the season that got him fired in Pittsburgh are shocking in their similarity.

Habs fans are more or less in open revolt at this point, and with good reason. It was probably never a good idea to hire Therrien in the first place, and the evidence has long since mounted that this was the case.