Canadiens crush Maple Leafs

The Canadiens crushed their one-time archrivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs, 6-2 at the Bell Centre Thursday night in a game that featured 140 penalty minutes, including eight 10-minute misconduct penalties and four fighting majors.

"It was a classic Original Six matchup," said Maxim Lapierre, who's too young to remember when these teams did produce classic games.

This one was a one-sided mismatch after Sergei Kostitsyn scored a power-play goal at 2:35 of the first period and Lapierre stepped out of the penalty box and made it 2-0 at 4:59.

"We wanted to get a quick start and we did," Lapierre said. "We played last night, but we didn't think about being tired. We knew this was a big game."

There were lots of things to like about this game - if you were a Canadiens fan.

There was another example of the team's depth. With six regulars out of the lineup, the Canadiens are playing some of their best hockey of the season. Six different players scored and they included third-liners Lapierre and Guillaume Latendresse as well as rookie Max Pacioretty, who has two goals and assist in the four games since he was called up from Hamilton.

There's the power play that is trying to prove it's better than its ranking of 27th in the NHL.

After going 2-for-4 in Wednesday's 6-3 win over the Rangers in New York, the Habs were 2-for-8 against the Leafs. Sergei Kostitsyn scored with the extra man in the first period and older brother, Andrei, scored in the second. Andrei also had two assists.

Veteran Alex Kovalev scored for the second time in as many nights and added an assist to share the team scoring lead with Robert Lang.

They each have 31 points.

Patrice Brisebois collected assists on each of the first three Montreal goals and moved into fifth place on the all-time Montreal defence scoring list with 364 points, one more than J.C. Tremblay. And Jaroslav Halak turned in another solid performance, stopping 32 shots to run his record to 8-6-1.

Halak was struggling a week ago, but goaltending coach Rollie Melanson said the netminder has tweaked a few things in his technique and that has made the difference.

That's good news, because the Canadiens need Halak as Carey Price has been slow recovering from an ankle injury. He tried skating Wednesday with little success and Melanson said there was no sense rushing him.

Tomas Kaberle and Matt Stajan scored for the Leafs.

It wasn't a sweet homecoming for Mikhail Grabovski, who was traded to the Leafs in the offseason. He was booed by the fans and was involved in altercations with Latendresse and fellow Belarusian, Sergei Kostitsyn.

He received two misconducts.

"He was trying to get something going, because they were down," Latendresse said. "But I didn't want to fight him, because there's a difference in our size."

The Kostitsyns and Grabovski were once friends, but Sergei said Grabovski has been bad-mouthing the brothers in the Russian press.

"He talks too much," Sergei said.

"Any time (Sergei) wants to fight, we can go out on the street," Grabovski snapped.

The recent surge in scoring is welcome, because the Canadiens haven't had much success scoring against the Capitals.