It’s been a frustrating start to the season for Carey Price and the Montreal Canadiens . (Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

Montreal is a tough market even when times are good. And for the Canadiens right now, times are quite the opposite of good.

They have one win in six games and even that was in a shootout, so their opponents have taken 15 of a possible 16 points against them. This was a team many considered to be one of the best in the East, and instead they’re dead last in the conference, by a decent margin.

On the surface, the problem is easy to diagnose: They’re shooting 4 percent and getting .877 goaltending. That’ll lose you a lot of games. Pretty simple, right?

Because like any Claude Julien team, they’re very good at taking more shots than their opponents, and things just aren’t going well for them in terms of the outcomes of those shots. But if you watch a Canadiens game, you see that they’re doing things a little like the Kings used to: They’re just taking a lot of attempts, and they aren’t particularly picky about where those shots come from.

Some people — usually, the chronically wrong kind — call this “gaming corsi” and say coaches do it to make their underlying numbers look better than they actually are. That, in turn, gives them plausible deniability if the team sucks, which, hey, the Canadiens sure seem to right now. At 5-on-5, the Habs take the third-most attempts per 60 of any team in the league, but are only eighth in expected goals, meaning that the quality of those shots isn’t quite consistent with the rate at which they happen. Both numbers are elite, however.

Meanwhile, the revamped Habs defense is submediocre, conceding the 19th-most shots per hour and giving up some high-quality looks, to the tune of the sixth-worst xGA/60 in the league.

Certainly these are issues to work on, but they don’t lead to anything resembling the results the Canadiens have gotten to this point. In terms of expected-goal plus-minus, they’re minus-0.03 at 5-on-5 and minus-1.4 overall. That means they “should have” given up about a goal and a half more than they’ve scored, which should put them at roughly .500 for the season, instead of being off to the second-worst start in the league and already being minus-21 in goals. That is to say, they’ve allowed about 19 more goals than they should have. Which is a lot.

I’m not going to sit here and try to relitigate for the millionth time whether a particular team is going to have a PDO that starts with “91” or even “95” all season. They are self-evidently much better than this. You can think what you want about the long-term prospects for Carey Price’s brand new contract, but you don’t typically see a guy’s talents diminish to the point that you lose 50 points of save percentage in a single summer. Pretty sure that’s not how aging curves work.

Likewise, the Canadiens were likely to struggle a bit more offensively this season than last, simply because of some of the talent they lost, and Jonathan Drouin wasn’t going to paper over everything. But Max Pacioretty, who’s fourth in the league in goals and 21st in points since the start of 2013-14 didn’t suddenly become a guy who can only score one goal and no assists in eight games.

It is worth asking if, given how things went for the Bruins last season, a Claude Julien system ends up being a lot like a Darryl Sutter system in the modern NHL, where you control a big chunk of the possession but have a lot more trouble converting than the average team. Much like everything went wrong offensively for the Kings and Bruins for much of last season, maybe this is symptomatic. But as was the argument with Sutter before he got canned, all you can do is put your team in a position to succeed as much as possible.

You cannot understate the role Marc Bergevin has played in making the Canadiens worse over the last few years, and anyway, it’s not like Julien is coaching for his job. He just signed a five-year deal, so he’s doing what any coach should do: Putting his team in the best position to win. Whether guys have the talent and luck to execute is another story entirely.

The other thing to keep in mind here is that these are the worst games of Price’s career since an 11-game stretch in the lockout-shortened season, when he went .865 over nine games right before the playoffs started. The next season he went .927 and the one after that he was the MVP. The point is, yeah, Price is in a slump right now and no one can score, but how long can you reasonably expect either of those conditions to last? You have Price, who, granted, is 30 at this point, playing his worst hockey in almost five years sandwiching the best 200 or so games any goalie has had in modern hockey (.928 from 2013-14 to 2016-17).