Habs lay an egg on home ice, losing 3-0 to the Sabres.

Uh oh Habs fans. Has the inevitable slump arrived? The Canadiens put forth another lousy effort last night and lost their second in a row to the surging Buffalo Sabres and their backup goalie Jocelyn Thibault. The offense was clearly nowhere to be found including an 0 for 3 performance on the power play. Cristobal Huet played a solid game stopping 32 of the 34 shots he faced, but you won't win many games if you can't score a goal.

Quick Hits:

Where's the intensity?? For the last couple of games the Canadiens have been lacking the intensity required to win games in this league. Guy Carbonneau and Kirk Muller need to do a better job of riling up the troops for each and every game. We have a good team, but if the players aren't all working hard every night then we are bound to have some problems.

Why do we have 2 fourth lines? I have a slight problem with the current lineup configuration. The way it's set up now we only have 2 lines that are capable of scoring, while the other 2 are essentially fourth lines. Coach Carbo should take the best 3 players from the third and fourth lines and combine them into one solid third line, leaving the remaining players to play on the fourth line.

Kovalev is losing his early season fire. For the first part of the season Alex Kovalev looked like he was completely re-born into a hard working, defensively responsible sniper. Currently, it looks like he is back to being the lazy, uninterested occasional goal scorer that we all came to know and love over the past few seasons. For the Habs to be successful Kovalev has to play the way he did through the first 12 games of the season when he was doing it all.

Send Latendresse to the minors already! Take the Latendresse challenge! During the next game I ask you (viewers) to forget about the puck and just watch Latendresse when he's on the ice. If you can honestly tell me that he isn't the worst player on the team, or that he wasn't rushed past the minors and into the NHL than I would say that you now nothing about hockey. Latendresse is simply going through the motions and not bringing anything positive to the team. Call up Lapierre!

Three Stars:

1) Jocelyn Thibault

2) Tomas Vanek

3) Brian Campbell