Jacques Martin took the extraordinary measure of holding a Sunday practice in an effort to find some solutions to this historic scoring the drought the Canadiens are in the midst of, and by all accounts it was a spirited skate.

Having not attended the practice, I figured I would do my part to try and figure out what exactly has gone wrong over the past three games.

For that, I turned to the comfort food that is statistics – and more importantly the fine people who track them – to see if I could turn up some trends.

Scoring chances are way down

First stop, Olivier Bouchard's blog En Attendant les Nordiques, which tracks the Canadiens scoring chances for and against in every game and really is the greatest source out there for a statistical breakdown of the team.

While I need no excuse to visit his site, I had a specific purpose for this trip because I wanted to see if the Canadiens are generating scoring chances at the same rate as before. To do this, I decided to look at the 10 games prior to the 6-3 loss to the New York Rangers on March 18, thereby eliminating one blowout for (the Minnesota game) and against the Canadiens.

In those 10 games the Canadiens went 7-3-0, so admittedly, we are using a pretty favourable sample.

Still, over that fruitful span the Canadiens averaged 12.3 even strength scoring chances per game and scored 2.2 even strength goals per game, meaning they cashed in once for every 5.6 scoring chances.

Over the past three games the Canadiens have averaged only 8.3 even strength scoring chances per game, and I don't think I need to tell you how often they've scored.

So while the significant 32 per cent drop in the number of scoring opportunities is startling, the Canadiens average rate of cashing in those chances over our 10-game sample would have given them at least four goals over the last three games.

On special teams, the Canadiens went 8-for-32 on the power play in the 10-game sample and have gone 0-for-10 over the past three games. Obviously the goal disparity is significant, but the number of power play chances the Canadiens have had is essentially identical on a per game basis. For the penalty killers, they haven't spent that much more time on the ice than they did over the sample set, averaging five penalty killing situations in the last three games compared to 4.5 per game in the sample.

So what I can draw out of all that is while the Canadiens are obviously not generating enough scoring opportunities, it is not the only problem plaguing the club.

A combination that works

My next stop, therefore, was the site maintained by Michael W Fleming, an associate professor in the faculty of computer science at the University of New Brunswick (which, by the way, beat McGill 4-0 Sunday in the gold medal game at the CIS men's hockey championship).

Fleming keeps a meticulous record of Canadiens line combinations throughout the season, which allows you to evaluate some of the changes that were made at Sunday's practice.

One of the main ones was to re-unite the line of Andrei Kostitsyn, Lars Eller and Travis Moen, a unit that produced seven goals and 12 assists in an 8-game stretch from Feb. 22 to March 10.

That meant Mathieu Darche jumped on the merry-go-round that is the left wing slot alongside Scott Gomez and Brian Gionta, while the other two lines remained untouched.

This is where I would have offered a suggestion.

Thanks to the data on Fleming's site, I've been able to ascertain that Benoit Pouliot has played 30 games with Darche on his opposite wing (give or take a few). In those 30 games, with Jeff Halpern, Lars Eller and David Desharnais serving as the centres at various points, Pouliot has nine goals and nine assists. In Pouliot's other 43 games, he has four goals and eight assists.

Furthermore, the Pouliot-Darche pairing has been pretty responsible defensively as well no matter who is playing at centre, though Desharnais does have a disadvantage here.

Meanwhile, just about the only player on the team who has not received a significant audition on Gomez's left wing is Ryan White, a player with the same intangibles as Moen and Darche but with a little more speed to keep up with the other two. Could be worth a shot.

At this point, having exhausted just about every other option in that spot, what could Martin possibly have to lose? 

Best advice is your own 

Of course, a little line tweaking like that probably won't force the scoring floodgates to open, because that will need to come from the players themselves. They will need to listen to the words they are speaking in the dressing room and actually apply them on the ice.

That'll mean staying out of the penalty box, particularly early in games because over the current losing streak the Canadiens have given opponents eight first period power play chances, or close to three per game. It causes a major stall in an offensive engine we can all concede is not all that power to begin with.

It will also mean establishing net presence the way opponents do on Carey Price, who has to clear his own lanes to see incoming shots on most nights. Saturday was a perfect example, as Price had to fight off the likes of Mike Knuble and Brooks Laich while Braden Holtby was able to casually snatch pucks out of the air at the other end without the need for so much as a head tilt to see the shot coming. That needs to change, and it's not just the so-called plumbers who need to do it.

Finally, a lot of players said both Saturday and Sunday how they need to be disciplined to the system by chipping pucks deep for line changes, by working hard in their own end to prevent extended shifts defending their own zone, by doing the things that have made them successful.

After Saturday night's game, a reporter attempted to goad Mike Cammalleri into slamming that system, and it wasn't a bad try. Hell, if there's one guy who'd probably like to leak out of his defensive zone a little bit or who'd like to be a third man in on a forecheck deep in the offensive zone, Cammalleri would be a pretty strong candidate.

Except he didn't take the bait.

"I'm a firm believer that your most sound games defensively end up creating the most chances offensively," he said.

Three games is a small sample size for judgment

That brings me to my final point.

This three-game drought has been like an all you can eat buffet for the people in this city who love to slam Martin because finally, after waiting through the excruciating pain of a thrilling playoff run and a season's worth of contending for first in the division, there's solid evidence that all the criticism that gets heaped towards him is true.

It reminds me a great deal of a certain pre-season game where a lot of people paid good money to come to the Bell Centre, seemingly in the hopes that Carey Price would fall flat on his face and fail in his first game action since he was chosen over the beloved playoff hero Jaroslav Halak. When it happened, there was no hesitation from many of those people to let him hear it.

A similar perfect storm appears to be brewing for Martin and his stifling defensive system that makes what appears to be a strong percentage of the Canadiens fan base a little crazy.

A three-game goal drought for the first time in 62 years just six games before the playoffs are to start is definitely a cause for concern, and it is Martin's responsibility to see to it that the team gets out of it very soon.

But try not to forget that a significant reason why the Canadiens are all but guaranteed of a playoff spot right now in spite of all the reasons they have to be long since eliminated is that very same coach that's boring you to tears.

But what, I ask, is more boring than springtime without playoff hockey?