Bruins offer slight glimpse into Jim Montgomery’s future with club
For Bruins general manager Don Sweeney, the (somehow still) ongoing discussions with restricted free agent Jeremy Swayman are occupying more than enough space to keep the veteran executive busy.
But the truth of the matter is that Swayman isn’t the only Bruin in need of some stability, as the Bruins also found themselves approaching decision time on head coach Jim Montgomery.
Entering the third and final year of his current contract with Boston, Montgomery is just a few weeks away from formally beginning his season as a ‘lame duck’ coach. And while Wednesday’s camp-opening press conferences at Warrior Ice Arena did not come with a breakthrough on that front, it did come with the closest thing you’re going to get to an update from the permanently tight-lipped Sweeney.
“There have been talks [of an extension],” Sweeney confirmed Wednesday. “I’m not going to speak for [Montgomery], but I’m going to guess that he’ll take Brad [Marchand]’s line of keeping that between us, but yeah, there have been talks of an extension.”
In two years on the job following the dismissal of Bruce Cassidy, Montgomery has more than delivered, with a league-best 112-32-20 record (.744 point percentage) over two seasons of work. Montgomery also oversaw what was the club’s first playoff series win since 2021 this past spring, with the B’s outlasting the Maple Leafs in a seven-game series ultimately decided by David Pastrnak’s overtime goal.
The Bruins have seen Montgomery work with two wildly different roster constructs, too, with an absolutely loaded 2022-23 squad that ultimately fell short and led to what was a project-heavy 2023-24 group. In both seasons, the Bruins were among the top threats in the Eastern Conference, and were (surprisingly enough) in contention for the Presidents’ Trophy until the final week of the season last year.
And after giving Montgomery a vote of confidence following Boston’s second-round loss to the Panthers, the B’s decided to bolster Montgomery’s staff, with a promotion for longtime assistant coach Joe Sacco as well as the addition of former P-Bruins head coach and recent Kraken assistant Jay Leach.
“Familiarity, from the standpoint of the organization, he’s very comfortable coming back to the organization and knowing how we’re trying to do things, and he’s been an advocate of that, I think, the everyday touches that he’ll have with every one of our defensemen will be beneficial,” Sweeney said of Leach’s return to the B’s organization. “I think he brings a new perspective to that as well. You know, you’re never going to outwork Jay in terms of how he approaches his daily life.
“I think our guys will appreciate his ability to connect with them while trying to make them better, pushing them in every area of their game. I think he’ll complement our staff.”
The last (and only) time the Sweeney-led Bruins found themselves in this spot with their head coach, they got ahead of things and inked then-coach Bruce Cassidy to a multi-year extension during training camp, and just three months after Cassidy helped take the Bruins to the 2019 Stanley Cup Final. Both Cassidy and the B’s brass talked about the importance of getting that done before the season so that Cassidy could have a clear mind when trying to lead the B’s to a Stanley Cup.
That same desire to get things done before the start of the season doesn’t seem to be something that Montgomery is hung up on as he approaches this year’s camp with an obvious eagerness following the B’s offseason additions of free-agent big fish Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov.
“I don’t think it would affect me,” Montgomery said of his uncertainty. “Just being honest.
“I love being a Bruin, I think I’m very fortunate to be a head coach of the Boston Bruins and my focus when I am the Boston Bruins [coach] is staying in the present and just getting better every day. I know it sounds cliche, but I can’t allow myself to think about the future because I’d be a little bit of a hypocrite, because I’m asking our players to always stay in the moment. I have to stay in the moment.
“That’s the way I look at things: Doesn’t matter if I had an eight-year contract or a one-day contract. That’s the way I proceed. That’s my process.”
Montgomery enters the 2024-25 season as the 12th-longest tenured coach in the NHL, and with the 6th through 12th-longest tenured coaches on that list all hired within the same month of one another.
