Once again, the Montreal Canadiens are making life interesting for their fans, of which I am one (see sidebar).

Les Canadiens had a strong start to this season, but since mid-December have been mired in a lengthy slump that threatens to send them tumbling out of playoff contention in the very tight Eastern Conference standings.

It’s the same pattern as last season, although then the crappy goaltending of Jose Theodore was primarily to blame. Claude Julien unfairly lost his job as Habs head coach last January in no small part due to Theodore’s performance, although he's now probably much happier as the bench boss of the red-hot New Jersey Devils.

It took the emergence of Cristobal Huet to give the Canadiens the goaltending it needed to get back into the playoff race and save the season. This season, however, it remains to be seen what, if anything, can snap this year’s version of the Canadiens out of their current malaise.

Now it should be noted that the Habs aren’t the only team to suffer through a lengthy slump this season.

The Ottawa Senators got off to such a horrific start to this season that many of their fans were clamoring for team captain Daniel Alfredsson to be traded back in November.

The Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks started the season slowly before finding their groove by December. The Tampa Bay Lightning were stumbling so badly prior to New Year’s that management threatened on two occasions to shake things up with a trade before they turned the corner.

It’s quite possible Les Boys can turn things around, but to do so, the coaching staff and the front office must address some critical problem areas.

First and foremost, this team can’t score, especially five-on-five. Earlier in the season their powerplay was able to off-set this problem but of late even the PP has cooled.

The guys expected to contribute offensively on the first line – team captain Saku Koivu, Michael Ryder, Chris Higgins – have come up snake-eyes far too often in recent weeks. No offense to Radek Bonk, Mike Johnson and Mark Streit, but when a team's third-and-fourth liners are doing most of the scoring over the past month, you've got a team in trouble offensively.

Alex Kovalev's game blows hot and cold, depending on the state of his knee and, according to some, his mood. Kovalev’s problem is that he needs to have a superstar linemate, like he did in Pittsburgh with Jaromir Jagr, to truly shine. When his linemates are average, so too is his production.

And of course there’s Sergei Samsonov, expected to bolster the offensive depth this season but instead became a horrible bust . It was noted that head coach Guy Carbonneau hasn’t put him on Koivu’s line this season. Given the way the Habs offense has dried up over the last month, one wonders if it would be such a bad idea to put Sammy and Captain K on the same line with Kovalev and hope for the best.

Another major problem is Huet has struggled over the past month. His strong play in the first half of the season earned him a berth in the All-Star game, but nobody would mistake him for an All-Star since New Year’s.

Thankfully, backup David Aebischer has taken over and has played very well for the Canadiens since the All-Star break. The losses the Habs compiled since then weren’t his fault, and his strong play likely means he won’t become the trade bait everyone expected he would be by the trade deadline should Huet continue to struggle.

But even with “Abby’s” goaltending, the Canadiens have lacked the energy they had earlier in the season. Their special teams, once among the best in the league, have been disturbingly average since the All-Star break. In two recent games against the Penguins, almost all of Pittsburgh’s goals came on the powerplay.

In other words, as bad as the PP has been of late, the PK has been even worse. Nothing but hard work is going to improve that.

Which leads to the obvious question: what’s the reason behind the Canadiens woes?

The answer might be that the players could be tuning out head coach Guy Carbonneau and his staff of Kirk Muller and Doug Jarvis.

Yes, these guys were expected to be no-nonsense coaches who’d motivate this team into a tighter, harder-working unit, and for the first three months of the season, they seemingly accomplished those goals.

But that hasn’t been apparent since the New Year. It’s caused star blueliner Sheldon Souray to openly take his teammates to task in a recent loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, proclaiming that the Habs were a better team than the Leafs but just weren’t playing like it.

I like Carbonneau, Muller and Jarvis, and I’m not advocating they be fired, as that would be ridiculous, but there’s something that’s missing, something that as a rookie coach “Carbo” hasn’t been able to tap into to snap his charges out of their moribund mindset.

Perhaps it’s the lack of an obvious superstar to rally around.

The Maple Leafs have rallied around Mats Sundin, the Sens around Heatley, Alfredsson and Redden; the Bolts around Lecavalier, Richards and St. Louis, the Flames around Iginla and Kiprusoff, the Canucks around Roberto Luongo.

As much as I admire Koivu, he’s not a superstar, not the kind of player who can hoist this team on his back through a rough patch and carry it through with his play. That’s been painfully obvious over the past six weeks. Captain K needs help, a sniper to benefit from his savvy playmaking.

The Canadiens could certainly use a player like that, but is it worth the short-term gain of pursuing, say, Peter Forsberg and his crooked foot and sacrificing the future?

The Habs have plenty of promising young players, and Bob Gainey isn’t a GM to start selling off that promise for a quick fix, but it’s also obvious now that if this team is to make the playoffs this season, let alone make any noise in the playoffs, Gainey may have to pull the trigger on a major deal to get it done.

If not, this team will have to look to within, something it’s been attempting to do without much success over the past two months.

Which could mean the rest of the season could be another down-to-the-wire gutwrencher for Canadiens fans.