from Pat Hickey of the Montreal Gazette,

“I’m frustrated as hell.”

That was coach Claude Julien’s state of mind Thursday night after the Canadiens’ losing streak reached six games with a 6-4 defeat at the hands of the New Jersey Devils.

Julien offered a litany of reasons for the current slide, but they all came to the same thing — a failure to play sound defence.

“We made mental errors,” Julien said. “They’re not the things we’re teaching. There are guys who are trying to do too much, When you get almost 50 shots and score four goals, you should win. But we had too many breakdowns. There were guys picking up the wrong players, bad line changes.”

The Canadiens don’t have much time to turn things around, They are back on the ice at the Bell Centre Saturday afternoon to face the Philadelphia Flyers and then they travel to Boston Sunday to play the Bruins, a team that handed them an 8-1 pasting on Tuesday.

Julien said the main task at practice on Friday will be to “get our players in the right frame of mind.” He noted that the Canadiens didn’t play perfect defence in their first 20 games, but they weren’t as bad as they are now and some of the results were skewed by a penalty-kill that has ben among the worst in the NHL all season.

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