Asking ourselves some awkward questions following Bruins-Jim Montgomery split
Like Claude Julien and Bruce Cassidy before him, former Bruins head coach Jim Montgomery didn’t stay unemployed for long.
In fact, Montgomery beat Julien and Cassidy, with Sunday’s move to the Blues coming a mere five days after the Bruins dismissed Montgomery from his post with Boston. Julien’s move from Boston to Montreal took seven days, while Cassidy found his post-Boston landing spot in Las Vegas just eight days after his shocking dismissal from the Bruins. And on Monday, after he was introduced to the team on Sunday evening, and with a five-year deal in St. Louis to his name, Montgomery stood in front of a Blues backdrop wearing an old Blues hoodie he had hanging around in his closet.
“Once a Blue, always a Blue,” a clearly emotional Montgomery, who has lived in the St. Louis area in the past and worked for the Blues after his dismissal from Dallas, noted before fielding questions for almost 15 minutes.
Imagine all of this a week ago.
Now, the fact that the Bruins decided to move on from Montgomery after two seasons and 20 games is not that surprising when you looked at how the team was playing. They were indeed getting worse — and during a segment of their schedule that they simply couldn’t afford to get worse — and the hole could only be dug so deep before Bruins general manager Don Sweeney had to do something. And in a league where coaches are averaging about two and a half years on the job, and where early-season impact trades are few and far between, it was the easiest move for Sweeney to make.
But the turnaround for all parties involved here is enough to force one to ask a few uncomfortable, awkward, and downright weird questions.
I guess the obvious one here off the jump is did Montgomery coach the Bruins knowing that he had this job in his back pocket?
Speaking at last week’s post-firing press conference, Sweeney confirmed that the Bruins did offer Montgomery a contract extension. Sources confirmed to 98.5 The Sports Hub that it was more than one, too. The sides talked during the summer, and though counteroffers were made each way, a deal was (obviously) not struck. The belief there is that money was an issue in their talks, and that Montgomery wanted to be paid closer to the top-level coaches in the NHL after a record-breaking first year on the job and then an arguably just-as-impressive 2023-24 campaign given the Bruins’ losses from a personnel standpoint during that offseason. Talks even went into the regular season (even after the Bruins were lamenting their training camp failures), but the differences between the sides remained. And then the team’s play started to slip into uncomfortable territory.
When it came to the money, Montgomery was in the third year of a contract that paid him $2 million annually. That put him just above the middle of the pack for NHL coaches, which is topped by Mike Sullivan’s $5.5 million in Pittsburgh and Jon Cooper’s $5.3 million in Tampa Bay. But overall, seven coaches make at least double what Montgomery made per season with the Bruins, including Cassidy in Vegas ($4.5 million). Going even deeper, three coaches hired after Montgomery was hired by the Bruins were already making more than him, including Rick Tocchet in Vancouver ($2.75 million), Craig Berube in Toronto ($3.5 million), and Peter Laviolette ($4.9 million) in New York. Montgomery obviously wanted — and felt that he had earned — the kind of payday that put him closer to the top of that bracket.
There could’ve been quibbles over some of the other things — namely the fact that Montgomery was not the one building out his staff — but money was at the heart of this. And there were some that outright wondered if Montgomery, who was not getting the money he wanted out of his talks with the Bruins given the concessions he was making along the way, was going to play out his final year all the way to the finish line and try to become the ‘belle of the ball’ as a coaching free agent in 2025. (Not too dissimilar from what Barry Trotz did before he signed a $20 million contract with the Islanders in 2018 and what many thought Rod Brind’Amour could’ve done before he ultimately re-signed with the Canes last spring.)
The Bruins would and will never outright tell you what they were offering, but they never liked when Montgomery would be called a “lame duck head coach” because in their opinion, he was not. In their opinion, they were trying to do everything they could to make him just the opposite.
But, again, was St. Louis always in the background?
To find the answer here, you have to go back to May. When the Bruins were an overtime goal against the Maple Leafs away from blowing a 3-1 series lead, the Blues were watching and twirling Maple Leaf rally towels. They knew that a series loss would’ve likely led to Montgomery’s dismissal, and open the door to bringing him on as their head coach. That did not happen, though, and as the Bruins advanced into the season round, the Blues made Drew Bannister their full-time head coach just four days later. That was after Bannister finished his season as the STL interim coach, and with 30 wins in 54 games for a Blues team that, well, left a lot to be desired.
This season, Bannister had the Blues off to a 9-12-1 start, which was nothing special, but softened by the fact that the Blues have dealt with an absolutely absurd number of injuries on their backend and were without top-line center Robert Thomas for a significant stretch of the season to date.
And under Bannister, the Blues had the 15th-most points in the NHL, and just eight fewer than the B’s, from his start date to the date of his dismissal.
That did not matter, though, as Blues general manager Doug Armstrong fired Bannister and replaced him with Montgomery this past weekend.
“The best line that put his hooks into me is, ‘When something delicious falls on my plate, I eat,’” Montgomery said of his conversations with Armstrong. “I don’t know. I guess I was a T-bone that day.”
As for when discussions first started, Montgomery opted not to get into the particulars, and instead wanted to focus on how happy he was to be back with the Blues. It’s possible Montgomery did not want to embarrass Bannister by saying that it started on Wednesday (when Bannister was still coaching the Blues), but Armstrong’s answers didn’t make it any less weird.
“I’ll keep that between Jim and I,” Armstrong said of the timeline of discussions between the Blues and Montgomery. “The process is the process behind the scenes, and it’s behind the scenes for a reason. I don’t think there’s any benefit for me to rehash the last little bit.”
As much as I love shooting down a good conspiracy theory, the sides seem entirely too guarded about this entire thing. And even the answers the sides did give on the subject make it impossible to feel like they didn’t have some sort of unspoken agreement that the door would be open for him in St. Louis the minute things went south in Boston, be it on the ice or at the negotiating table.
And when they went south at both points, and with Montgomery now out the door, you can’t help but look back at some of the things that happened during the Black and Gold’s 20-game slopfest to open the year.
There were entirely too many games this season where you’d watch the calamity unfold, absorb the press conference that followed, and go, “Man, they’re cooked.” But now that we look back, was it that they were cooked and that Montgomery didn’t have the answers or was it that he didn’t care to truly find them knowing that he wasn’t getting what he wanted from the team in any respect, be it from the roster he didn’t build, the staff he didn’t build, or the contract he couldn’t negotiate to his liking?
The reactions behind the bench were always entirely too tame with the exception of a shout-and-shove to Brad Marchand in Utah, and the body language of watching an ass-beating with a weird sense of resignation and with your hands in your pockets looks worse now.
Of course, though, it’s worth noting that the Bruins were quick to say that Montgomery did not “lose the room.” So at the very worst, you have to ask yourself whether or not the Bruins’ room was hip to the fact that they had a coach who had one foot out the door or wasn’t all that interested in abandoning who he was to get the most out of this year’s roster.
It just felt like the Bruins had an unbelievably difficult time getting the emotional fight and ‘get-up’ needed to truly compete in this league. And sometimes it felt like it started at the top, with Montgomery playing hands-in-his-pocket passenger to the disaster unfolding before his team. (Montgomery’s lack of a reaction on the Jamie Benn hit on Brandon Carlo felt especially odd, with Montgomery simply standing there when the referees reduced the penalty with Carlo visibly wobbling and injured.)
“I just didn’t like the direction,” Sweeney admitted. “We’ve had a small incremental bump in terms of going to play the right way in Philadelphia and coming home to Seattle but we couldn’t maintain it. Even in the course of games we couldn’t. We’re in a 2-1 hockey game in Dallas, we get off to a tough start, the first shot goes in but you battle back. You’re in a 2-1 hockey game and all of a sudden, bang, three goals? That’s just part of the things that bother me as a general manager, where our team can’t stay as close as they’ve been, can’t get through the adversities within the game, and they can’t respond from game to game and that’s where I make a decision.”
As Montgomery said in his re-introduction to the Blues media contingent, he who he is and he doesn’t change. That felt true during the late stages of his Bruins run, with Montgomery still coaching as if he still had Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, Taylor Hall, and Tyler Bertuzzi on his roster. This roster undoubtedly had its limitations, and those limitations may have accelerated Montgomery’s departure from the organization, but you could feel a disconnect really beginning and building during the 2024 postseason.
At the heart of it all was the ‘quality vs. quantity’ debate that had mixed reactions.
When the Bruins were scoring a majority of their goals on ‘throw it on goal and see what happens’ approaches in the postseason and when their roster construct confirmed it was perhaps their best chance at maximizing their results, Montgomery wanted his group to hold out for higher-quality looks. “I mean, I think every shot is a good shot this time of year, to be honest with you,” one player mused to me during the “debate.”
“I think that we probably have to get back to a little more simplistic approach because we haven’t been able to execute a system that was pretty damn successful,” Sweeney said last week when revisiting that debate. “It could be more player-driven. The hockey sense level of Patrice Bergeron isn’t going to be replicated. These guys are more than capable of playing, executing and performing, and that’s what we want to find out. We want to find out what this team is capable of based on where we’re at right now. With 60 games to go, there’s a lot of season. But you can’t stay in neutral.”
And this season, you had repeated instances of Bruins captain Brad Marchand by all means saying that the Bruins had something of an identity crisis, with Marchand noting that the Bruins played their best when they realized they weren’t a skill team and instead focused on the details. And though it’s been just two games under Joe Sacco, those details have been there and their commitment to more of a shot-clock advantage has been there. The Bruins also had no doubts that Sacco, who is more ‘Boston blunt’ than anything else, would be the guy to coax that out of this team.
One thing that was on my mind, though, was whether or not the Bruins had a roster that had become too comfortable. Given the number of guys who got paid and/or had no-movement and no-trade clauses, were the Bruins simply too content and was that something that got Montgomery fired?
“Do you worry that your roster is too comfortable?” I asked Sweeney.
“No, players that had no movements and no trades, they’ve moved around this league and that’ll continue to do so,” Sweeney noted. “We’re going to identify the guys that love being here, love representing the Boston Bruins… and if they don’t, we’ll make some changes as a result of that and performance will drive that. But no, I’m not concerned about that.”
And here we are, left to wonder if Montgomery was one of those who ultimately didn’t want to be here knowing what else was out there for him.
As uncomfortable and awkward as that situation seemed just one week ago.
