As was always going to be the case, Bruins general manager Don Sweeney, and with the blessing of Bruins president Cam Neely, got to fire his third coach in seven years Tuesday afternoon.
And his authority to do exactly that was something that never once appeared to be in doubt.
In 2022 and in the wake of firing Bruce Cassidy, Bruins CEO Charlie Jacobs stuck to the facts when it came to the Neely-Sweeney tandem being allowed to move on from Cassidy. Jacobs noted that the Bruins had been to three Stanley Cup Finals in 11 years under Neely’s leadership, and that the team had posted a .600 winning percentage since switching from Peter Chiarelli to Sweeney in 2015. And two years later, speaking after Boston’s second straight playoff exit at the hands of the Panthers, Jacobs ditched the facts but made it clear that he was standing by his braintrust.
“Well, there was a change, we let go of our coach [and] we have a new one sitting here,” Jacobs said when pressed as to why the Bruins were not making any changes with their leadership. “This is unfortunately a second playoff exit, a little further this year than last year, but we have had change.
“They have my utmost confidence, and I feel like we haven’t necessarily found our ceiling yet, in terms of the opportunity of this team. I believe in them to find that ceiling. And hence, they have my confidence and therefore no change. I don’t foresee a change in these personnel for this upcoming season.”
That was until, again, Sweeney (and with Neely’s blessing) decided that yet another change had to come. And yet again, that change had to come below them, with Jim Montgomery the latest Jack Adams-winning head coach to be fired by the franchise.
And, again, this was a decision that was only a shock to those who had not heard the anvil whistling from the team management suite on the ninth floor of TD Garden and making a Spoked-Beeline for Montgomery since the moment camp opened and closed without a contract extension to his name.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a near-decade of covering Sweeney, it’s that everything said is extremely calculated. Sometimes to a fault when it comes to the delivery. And the Bruins’ answers on questions regarding talks with Montgomery were always extremely surface level.
The last we had heard from Sweeney, he merely confirmed that there had been talks between the sides. That, after adding a finalist for Montgomery’s then-current job to the staff and promoting another, was never a promising sign for Montgomery. It always felt like an unspoken acknowledgement that they preferred having the easiest exit plan possible at their disposal should things not have gone as planned.
Where did it go wrong for Montgomery?
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – APRIL 30: Jim Montgomery speaks to the media after the Florida Panthers defeat the Bruins 4-3 in overtime of Game Seven of the First Round of the 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
As noted, the Bruins clearly made their decision on Montgomery before Monday’s loss. It was painfully obvious, really. At no point did the Bruins give Montgomery a vote of confidence — even, or especially rather, when it felt like he needed it the most following each red-faced postgame press conference — and their silence was deafening. And it wasn’t like the Bruins were going to suddenly rattle off a five-game win streak and the Bruins were going to be, “Oh, hell yeah, let’s lock this guy in for another three years.” Something was absolutely off.
But where and when did this happen?
Internally, you always had to wonder if the Bruins were ever going to get over what happened in 2023. Sweeney gave Montgomery an absolute super-team (and ruined the cap for the 2023-24 club in the process) in pursuit of one more Cup for Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci, only for Montgomery to press every wrong button in a seven-game stunner to the Panthers. Montgomery, who always tried to look on the positive side of things, remarking how great of a hockey game the B’s Game 6 loss in Sunrise was — y’know, the game where they blew multiple leads — never felt like a comment that truly resonated with the rest of the Black and Gold operation.
And I don’t think it got better in 2024.
After Hampus Lindholm and David Pastrnak saved Montgomery from becoming the only coach in pro sports history to blow a 3-1 series lead in back-to-back postseasons, the Bruins were given another crack at the Panthers, where pure hatred reigned supreme from the jump.
And after Sam Bennett knocked out Bruins captain Brad Marchand in Game 3, Bennett continued his run as one of the greatest villains in recent Boston sports history and cross-checked Charlie Coyle into the net en route to the game-tying goal in a Game 4 ultimately won by the Panthers. After the game, Montgomery was asked about the non-call and simply said that he thought the referees and the league did a great job. That was not the answer anybody inside those walls wanted to hear, even if Sweeney decided to hold an impromptu press conference scold all of us for asking Montgomery about this. (There’s something to make of Sweeney going into damage control there, if you want my own opinion on that.)
I think for the Bruins, there were real questions (and rightfully so) as to whether or not Montgomery could be a true ‘war general’ in the postseason. Or, at the very least, that he would be able to truly connect with the often-insular culture of Boston sports and what their fans want out of their coaches. This was something that Bruce Cassidy, for all his flaws, always seemed to understand and use to his advantage when conveying his message. It helped that Cassidy was a Bruins diehard throughout his life, and could relate with you, me, and anybody within 25 miles of TD Garden at any given point in their life about the triumphs and tortures of being a Bruins fan.
After back-to-back postseason runs where the tone felt more ‘happy to be there’ than ‘[expletive] you, this is ours’, were the Bruins ever going to feel comfortable with Montgomery being the one leading them into war in a playoff bracket that was almost guaranteed to see him go head-to-head with Paul Maurice, Jon Cooper, or Craig Berube?
They might say yes, but it sure didn’t feel like it.
The roster is the roster, but…
Oct 8, 2024; Sunrise, Florida, USA; Boston Bruins head coach Jim Montgomery reacts from the bench against the Florida Panthers during the third period at Amerant Bank Arena. (Sam Navarro/Imagn Images)
Just nine days ago, I told you that firing Montgomery wouldn’t fix what’s ailed the Bruins this season. I still feel that way. The Bruins have built a slower, less versatile roster that takes entirely too many penalties and has a secondary scoring arsenal built almost entirely on the backs of players who had career-best years a season ago. When it comes to 82-game sustainability from a production standpoint, the Black and Gold feel straight-up messy right now, and the numbers all confirm as much.
But lest we forget that this is a roster that Montgomery ultimately thought was better than the one he led — and to the shock of many, you’d gotta admit — to Presidents’ Trophy contention for about 76 games in 2023-24. As shown in Behind The B, Montgomery was in the B’s war room during their July 1 signing spree, and expressed no concerns about what he could get out of the 2024-25 roster.
“We’re much stronger up the middle,” Montgomery said. “We’re a better team, on paper, than we were last year with the way it’s constructed already. We have a lot more flexibility, is what I’m saying.”
Now, there was no way for Montgomery to properly forecast that Charlie Coyle and Pavel Zacha would start as slow as they have, and that Elias Lindholm wouldn’t gel with David Pastrnak and become a truly lost player at the quarter mark of his first season with the Bruins. That’s more Sweeney’s department, without a doubt. But you had to figure that Montgomery would find a way to get something more out of those slumping players like he did in the first two years on the gig, where the Bruins seemingly thrived when it came to getting the most out of their talent.
At the end of the day, the roster’s limitations absolutely fall on Sweeney more than Montgomery, but it also felt clear that Montgomery ran out of legitimate solutions when it came to squeezing the most out of those mid-tier players. And that problem wasn’t going to solve itself when considering the salary pie that’s been eaten up by the players currently viewed as franchise cornerstones (David Pastrnak, Charlie McAvoy, and Jeremy Swayman).
This should be Sweeney-Neely’s final firing
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – MAY 26: General Manager Don Sweeney of the Boston Bruins speaks during Media Day ahead of the 2019 NHL Stanley Cup Final at TD Garden on May 26, 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
For all our disagreements and contentious back-and-forths at press conferences over the years, I actually do think Don Sweeney is a pretty solid general manager and have thought that for a while now. We’re all entirely too dug in on our opinions to truly sway one another so I won’t bother trying here, but he’s simply not as good nor as bad as his supporters and critics scream on the internet and on the airwaves. He’s truly somewhere in the middle, with, again, ‘pretty solid’ being the best way to describe his body of work throughout his tenure.
But barring something downright catastrophic or unpredictable from a conduct standpoint involving the next permanent head coach, Montgomery has to be the last coach that Sweeney (and Neely) are allowed to fire.
It’s now been 13 years and counting since the Bruins last won a Cup. It’s now been over five years since they made it to the fourth round, and in Sweeney’s nine seasons on the job to date they’ve won multiple playoff rounds just once (2019). And at a certain point, as coaches continue to be dismissed for not meeting the front office’s bar for one reason or another, the bar for the GM to keep his job has to be set higher than “just make the playoffs.”
As an organization (and when I say that I mean at the top), the Bruins have essentially scoffed at the idea of ever committing themselves to a Chicago-style — tomato slices and gigantic pickle slices at LW1 and RD1 — rebuild. Their thinking behind that is that their fans would not accept that kind of arduous process that’s defined by overwhelming stretches of team-engineered futility for the hopes of dynasty potential five years down the road. Their last experience with that came all the way back in 2005, and by spring 2007 they were officially done with it.
So, when you factor that philosophy into the equation, Sweeney is their perfect general manager. He’s never once operated from a rebuilding mindset, and he’s built a playoff club in every year but his first, and even that year they were a Tuukka Rask sickness in Game 82 away from sneaking into the postseason.
But there’s not another GM in hockey who’s been allowed to fire three coaches before meeting the executioner’s blade himself. And there’s no denying that Sweeney’s moves are a significant reason why Montgomery is beginning his Wednesday morning with emails from Indeed, Zillow, and an ‘Open to Work’ banner on his LinkedIn.
It was Sweeney, not Montgomery, who made Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov his July 1 priorities less than two months after saying that the Bruins needed to get faster and add secondary scoring. And it was Sweeney, not Montgomery, who decided to commit $11.25 million in goal after by all means acknowledging that it wasn’t feasible to pay Swayman his money and keep Linus Ullmark around at $5 million per season for another year.
And it was Sweeney and Neely, not Montgomery, who’ve apparently had their brains broken so badly by what the Panthers have done to them in back-to-back postseasons that they’ve decided to send the Bruins back in time with size and grit in a game that’s only getting more skilled and faster every single season.
It’s on the Black and Gold’s next coach to maximize what they do have courtesy of Sweeney, of course, but if they can’t, there’s truly nobody to blame but the guys who built the roster in the first place. Especially as the current banners in the TD Garden rafters only get older and become more and more of a distant memory.
Time for B’s best to respond
Dec 23, 2023; Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA; Boston Bruins right wing David Pastrnak (88) celebrates his goal with defenseman Charlie McAvoy (73) against the Minnesota Wild in the first period at Xcel Energy Center. (Brad Rempel/USA TODAY Sports)
If you’re keeping score at home, the Bruins made a change with Bruce Cassidy because his messaging was too tough and the players ultimately grew sick of it and found the working conditions too difficult. So then they made the switch to Jim Montgomery, who could not have been more different than Cassidy in terms of the whole package, and the Bruins by all means stopped playing for him not even halfway into his third season on the job.
So Montgomery, with a 120-41-23 record to his name behind the Bruins bench, was shown the door.
That’s a rough look for this core.
In 2024, the reporters who cover this team are officially not in the locker room enough to truly know the inner workings of this franchise and its proverbial pecking order. You’ll get about five to 10 minutes after a practice, and it’s almost always a scrum, and then we all go on our way. Hell, even after Monday’s loss, Brad Marchand outright admitted that “it’s a very private locker room” when discussing the overall dynamic of the team. In other words, I can’t sit here and tell you that the Bruins have a ‘toxic’ locker room or that there’s something truly broken there. It would be pure speculation, and that’s not something I’m ever going to be comfortable giving you.
But if I’m operating with what we’ve seen with our own eyes, that’s now two completely different styles that have produced similar endings for the Bruins, one behind closed doors and the other on full display for 20 games. (I gotta say, the latter felt worse, as the Bruins have put forth some of the most unwatchable hockey this season.)
And now it’s on the Bruins’ leaders to step up.
When the Bruins fired Claude Julien in 2017, I remember the day after being a somber one in the Boston locker room. A lot of the team’s core players knew they got Julien fired. Not directly per se, but because of their play and their inability to rise to the occasion for their coach. The Bruins should feel a similar way on Wednesday.
David Pastrnak, even with a team-leading 17 points in 20 games, has not been good enough this season. At least if we’re going off the Hart-level expectations he’s set for himself. The risks of his carelessness with the puck, as well as his casual-looking approach when outside of the offensive zone, have often outweighed the reward of his takeover ability and otherworldly offensive abilities. His shot has also gone wide of the net 29 times this season, which is the third-most in the NHL entering Wednesday’s slate of games.
Now in the fifth year of this being Charlie McAvoy’s blue line following the departure of Zdeno Chara, the 26-year-old is still struggling to be the far-and-away best defenseman on the ice every night. It’s been there in pockets, but not nearly enough for a player with his raw talent level. McAvoy has also gone without a point in 15 of 20 games, and has been the quarterback of a Boston power-play unit that’s posted a league-worst 11.7 percent success rate.
And after the loudest contract negotiation in recent Bruins history, Jeremy Swayman has been below replacement level out of the gate, with an .884 save percentage that ranks 49th among a group of 59 goaltenders with at least five games played this season. And Swayman, who’s never been afraid to make promises and whose confidence has always been a major driving force for this team when things get rocky, admitted after Monday’s loss that he needs to be a lot better for his team and that he will be.
It’s entirely possible that we’ve all severely downplayed the amount of leaders the Bruins have lost over the last two years. I mean, just think about this: The Bruins cited Kevin Shattenkirk, who was in his first and what turned out to be his only year with the Bruins, as a major reason why the Bruins felt confident entering Game 7 against Toronto. But for better or worse, these guys are a huge part of this franchise as its new leaders, and so while they’ll have to wear what happened to Montgomery, they’ll also need to prove that they can be everything they are paid to be for this team no matter the stylings of the man behind the bench.
‘Sacco Magic’ is a tough sell in the now
Dec 11, 2021; Calgary, Alberta, CAN; Boston Bruins assistant coach Joe Sacco on his bench against the Calgary Flames during the third period at Scotiabank Saddledome. (Sergei Belski/USA TODAY Sports)
If you were to give the Bruins some truth serum, I think that they would outright tell you that they did not want to fire Jim Montgomery. They’d tell you it’s just easier to fire a coach than trade 15 underachieving players, many of whom have some form of trade protection or would be dealt at their lowest possible value.
I think they’d also acknowledge the fact that going with a member of Montgomery’s staff as the replacement is a tough sell in the now. Because, boy oh boy, is it ever given what we’ve seen out of the gate this season.
At the time of Montgomery’s firing, the Bruins ‘boast’ a bottom 10 offense, bottom 10 defense, bottom 10 power-play percentage, and bottom 10 penalty-kill percentage. The struggles of that staff go beyond just Montgomery, but it’ll be a key member of Montgomery’s staff who gets promoted for these struggles in associate coach and now interim head coach Joe Sacco.
“I believe Joe Sacco has the coaching experience to bring the players and the team back to focusing on the consistent effort the NHL requires to have success,” Sweeney said in the statement confirming the coaching changes. “We will continue to work to make the necessary adjustments to meet the standard and performance our supportive fans expect.”
“I’m supportive of Don’s decision to address our current play and performance. Joe Sacco has a wealth of experience and knowledge of our roster and can help lead our team in the right direction,” Neely said in the team-provided statement. “He has a strong understanding of our standards and expectations, and I trust he will do all he can to accomplish our organization’s goals this season.”
On one hand, Sacco being the guy makes sense when you consider that he’s been with the organization for over a decade now and has been on three different staffs between Julien, Cassidy, and Montgomery. They’ve seemingly always been able to separate Sacco from the current head coach at any point in time, and Sacco’s work as the coach behind Boston’s penalty kill is probably reason enough to keep him around. But the kill has never been worse than it has been this year, which is not the most encouraging development when it comes to a promotion, and the idea of the new voice being the voice that’s actually been there the longest is an equally difficult sell.
And one can’t help but ask if Sacco has the goods and knowledge to bring the Bruins back to the consistent level Sweeney and Neely want, then why wasn’t he doing that as an associate coach?
It’s been over a decade since Sacco’s last run as a full-time head coach, with the Medford, Mass. native behind the Colorado bench from 2009 to 2013, though he did have a six-game run in 2021 where he went 3-1-2 as Boston’s temporary head coach during Bruce Cassidy’s COVID-related absence.
Sacco could be the kick in the ass that the B’s roster needs — and the fact that he’s seen three different coaching styles during his time here could help him figure out the ideal message — but with this team being in the all-situation mess it is, there wasn’t an internal hire that would’ve inspired much confidence in the now.
The fact that Sacco has waited this long for his next chance is also a potential reason for optimism. It’s not all that different from Cassidy’s second chance with Boston in 2017 from a timeline and ‘biding your time’ standpoint.
But the truth may very well be that Boston’s turnaround, should it come, may have nothing to do with their coach at all. With limited depth scoring, the Bruins have built a roster that’s almost entirely predicated on their nightly results being dictated by hot shooting and excellent goaltending. They’ve gotten neither this season, with an 8.87 shooting percent as a team this season, which is the fifth-worst mark in the NHL, along with a team save percentage of .883 (10th-worst in the NHL). In essence, with a PDO (your shooting percentage combined with your save percentage) that ranks as the fourth-worst in the NHL, it’s entirely possible that it’s pure puck luck and puck luck alone, not the coach, that may hold the key to the fate of the 2024-25 season.
At least until proven otherwise.
