(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

All season it has looked as though the Montreal Canadiens were going to waltz to an Atlantic Division title. That's what happens when you win your first nine games.

But it's starting to look as though the cushion the Habs built is becoming very worn and thin, because after that white-hot start, they've gone 11-11-3, including regulation losses in seven of their last eight, as injuries piled up and the rest of the team had no answers for a fairly difficult schedule that only gets harder. Their next seven games, including what's shaping up to be a fateful Winter Classic, are also on the road.

Meanwhile the Bruins, once looking like a borderline playoff team, have turned back into the Boston of old. Over the last month or so they're 11-1-3, and scoring goals at an absurd clip. In those 15 games, they've scored 46 goals (3.07 per) and allowed just 28 (1.87 per). In that time they've narrowed the gap between themselves and their greatest rival to just one point, from the previous 13. And it's a trend we might be able to expect to continue.

This comes despite the fact that Montreal's losing is almost entirely due to the fact that they aren't getting the percentages they once did in terms of results (shooting and save percentage) but continue to hold up their end of the bargain when it comes to possession. And, perhaps unsurprising when you take points in 14 of 15, the opposite isn't necessarily true for Boston.

Even despite the apparent improvement in their play in the last month, the Bruins remain a sub-50 possession team and have actually gotten a little bit worse in this regard. Blame it on whatever you like, but that's not a long-term recipe for success. And despite the Habs' drop-off in winning, you'd have to say that as long as your possession numbers are in the mid-50s you're going to start getting things to go your way once again at some point.

Except, maybe not.

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The issue for the Habs is that they've been without Carey Price, and using a guy who's basically an AHL call-up as their goaltender for the better part of a month and a half. You can see that when Price is in the lineup, the Canadiens are getting — and frankly should expect to get — save percentages well above the league average of about .923. When he's not, they give up a ton of goals, as you also might expect.

Meanwhile, Boston has gotten absurd goaltending from Tuukka Rask, because of course it has. Rask is an elite goaltender who got out to an awful start for his first seven or eight games. Once he became Rask again, they started putting together more wins and digging themselves out of their serious early-season hole.

At the same time, Boston has carried a roughly average 5-on-5 shooting percentage that occasionally dipped below that, but a mega-strong power play that is scoring at an unsustainable rate. Montreal, on the other hand, has dropped off significantly in terms of shooting success, but it was never going to keep up the percentages in the 9-plus percent range it has seen multiple times this season.