The Dallas Stars have made half the league look terrible by comparison, so the Montreal Canadiens shouldn’t feel too badly about their 6-2 loss on Saturday night. But it’s not who you lose to in the NHL, but how you lose, and the Habs thought they royally sucked last night.

“I don’t know why we forgot how to play the game,” said captain Max Pacioretty. “Before we said we were playing well and not getting lucky. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

Which is to say that this is now an ongoing thing for the Habs, who sprinted out to a ridiculous start (with a healthy Carey Price) and then sorta faked it for a while (without Carey Price) and now are in the kind of free-fall they desperately wanted to avoid until Carey Price returns sometime in January (2-7-1 in their last 10).

“Just look at my interviews for the last 10 games, it’s the same [expletive] thing. It’s a joke. Eight penalties against a team like that? It's embarrassing,” said Pacioretty. “I don’t know why we don’t have confidence. We have to find answers really quick.”

It’s not just missing Price, although that’s a loss that affects all facets of the Canadiens’ game – and chiefly their confidence. Their offense has sputtered to a stop.

They’re actually getting slightly more scoring chances in their last nine games (27 per 60 minutes 5v5) than they did in the previous 25 games (25.5), via War On Ice. But they’re averaging just 1.72 goals per game in their last 11 games.

Pacioretty has one goal in eight games, skating to a minus-9. Tomas Plekanec has two assists in his last seven games. P.K. Subban has three assists in 11 games.

(David Desharnais has one assist in 12 games and yet inexplicably gets more ice time than Alex Galchenyuk, one of the few Habs hitting the score sheet.)

The connective thread between those first two names is, of course, Brendan Gallagher, whose hand injury has kept him out since Nov. 22. He did plenty of hard work on their top line with Pacioretty and Plekanec, and they’re lost without him.

So a 10-point-plus lead in the Atlantic has whittled down to a three-point advantage over the Boston Bruins, who had three games in-hand and host the New Jersey Devils this Sunday. It’s also down to four points over the Detroit Red Wings (32 games to the Habs’ 34) and the Ottawa Senators (39 in 33 games). Even the Florida Panthers are in screaming distance at 38 points (33 games).

But it’s Boston that’s the story.

View photos Snowflakes are projected onto the ice at Boston Garden as Boston Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara (33) skates during a warm up before the first period of an NHL hockey game against the Edmonton Oilers in Boston, Monday, Dec. 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) More

The Bruins were picked as the team on the decline, the team that would miss the playoffs and re-evaluate life. They were picked as the team with management that was inept at worst, erratic at best in the offseason.

And now they’re 6-1-3 in their last 10 games with designs on the top of the conference.

For all the talk about how Claude Julien needed to juice the offense to save his job – and they are, as the Bruins are second in the NHL at a 3.26 GPG, after being 22nd at 2.55 GPG last season – it’s that classic Bruins defense that’s fueling this recent run.

It starts with the goaltending, as it usually does, but the top pairing of Zdeno Chara and Adam McQuaid has been rejuvenated.

From the Boston Herald:

“Obviously Z and Adam have done a great job together, I think, of shutting down some big lines,” Julien said after practice at the Garden yesterday. “Having said that, I think Dennis Seidenberg’s game’s really come along lately. He’s starting to resemble the player he was. So that’s another plus for us on the back end.

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