MONTREAL -- These were not the Montreal Canadiens of Beliveau and Richard and Lemaire.

Or, for that matter, of Dryden and Cournoyer and Lafleur.

The Penguins just made them look that way -- or better -- for much of their 5-3 loss Saturday afternoon at the Bell Centre.

The reality is that this is an ordinary Canadiens team that is struggling to get into the playoffs, and was using a patchwork lineup featuring the less-than-legendary likes of David Desharnais, Brock Trotter and Ben Maxwell.

Forget wondering whether any of those guys will have their NHL sweaters displayed in the arena rafters someday; there are reasonable doubts about just how many times they'll actually wear one.

Didn't matter on this day, though. The group the Canadiens dressed -- unimpressive as it was -- was more than enough to overwhelm the Penguins for most of the game.

"We followed up a couple of our better games of the year with probably one of our worst games of the year," defenseman Mark Eaton said. "If we play like that, we're not going to give ourselves a chance to win many games."

Indeed, Montreal, which is bobbing along at barely over .500 (28-25-6) outshot the Penguins, 32-21, and could have won by a considerably more comfortable margin if it had more than a few players with NHL-caliber finishing skills. Or if the league awarded half-goals for missing the net on quality scoring chances.

A victory would have moved the Penguins (35-22-1) back to within a point of first-place New Jersey in the Atlantic Division. Instead, they go into today's game at Washington at 12:08 p.m. needing a victory against a team that has won 13 in a row simply to break even for the weekend.

"Anytime you're playing a team that's below you in the standings, you want to take advantage of that," Penguins left winger Matt Cooke said. "And we didn't. We weren't sharp."

Actually, they were, at least for a brief stretch late in the second period and early in the third.

Although the Penguins had been outshot, 22-9, through the first 33 1/2 minutes of play, after Bill Guerin scored at 13:57 to slice Montreal's lead to 3-2, the Penguins picked up the pace and began to control play.

"When Billy scored, I thought we were going to come back and win this game," forward Craig Adams said.

They pressed for the tying goal on shift after shift, but were unable to solve Canadiens goalie Jaroslav Halak.

Finally, at 7:15 of the third period, Montreal winger Mathieu Darche -- who had made Montreal's first goal 29 seconds into the opening period possible by knocking down Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury when he went behind the net to play the puck -- snuffed the comeback by beating Fleury with a slap shot from the top of the left circle.

Fleury said Darche's shot did not glance off the stick of teammate Sergei Gonchar, but allowed that "it just seemed like it knuckled a little bit."

Darche's goal convinced coach Dan Bylsma to replace Fleury with Brent Johnson, but that did not alter the course of the game.

Johnson gave up a goal to Brian Gionta, his second of the game, at 10:47 before Evgeni Malkin scored on a short-handed breakaway at 16:44 to close out the scoring.

The course of the game had been set long before those two goals, however. Aside from that surge after the Guerin goal, the Penguins never got into a rhythm.

"We didn't have our game, and execution level," Bylsma said. "We didn't have our brains into how we needed to play, and that was evident."

Coincidentally or otherwise, this game was the Penguins' first after a four-day break that will be their longest of the regular season.

They took two days off and practiced on the other two. But despite the disruption to their routine, Bylsma and his players fiercely rejected any suggestion that the break was a factor in their performance.

"It shouldn't make a difference," Eaton said. "We just didn't do what we needed to do."

That was evident in the Canadiens' 7-3 edge in power plays. In the way Halak was able to thwart the Penguins during the time when their game was meshing. By how Montreal usually found a way to make the plays it needed, and the Penguins didn't.

"We just didn't play well enough, in all aspects," Adams said. "We got what we deserved."

Penguins Plus, a blog by Dave Molinari and Shelly Anderson, is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.