The Boston Bruins didn’t want it to come to this.
Not Cam Neely, not Don Sweeney, and especially not Jim Montgomery.
But after starting the season with championship aspirations only to come out of the gate a pedestrian 8-9-3, there was not much else the Bruins could do but fire Montgomery from his head coaching position on Tuesday and named associate coach Joe Sacco as his interim replacement.
Nothing has gone the Bruins’ way this season, and none of the tactics that Montgomery used in an attempt to turn their fortunes did the trick.
He tried being upbeat, using fun and positivity to spark confidence among the roster. He tried a firm hand, making examples out of Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak for the team’s overall sloppy play.
With every passing game, each time the Bruins took one step forward and two steps back, it became more and more clear that Montgomery had lost his grip on the locker room.
But even though Montgomery is gone, the bigger issues that have plagued the Bruins this season remain.
The team still has the league’s worst power play. It still owns a minus-21 goal differential, and far too many players on its roster underperforming.
As a result, the Bruins fired a head coach who had amassed an astounding 120-41-23 record behind the bench in Boston just two years after he led the organization to the greatest regular season in NHL history and won the Jack Adams Award as the league’s best coach.
“Jim Montgomery is a very good NHL coach and an even better person,” Sweeney, the team’s general manager, said via a press release. “He has made a positive impact throughout the Bruins organization, and I am both grateful and appreciative of the opportunity to work with him and learn from him…Our team’s inconsistency and performance in the first 20 games of the 2024-25 season has been concerning and below how the Bruins want to reward our fans.”
The Bruins have only played 20 games to this point, and the season is far from over. But even though they sit in a playoff spot as of today, it won’t last much longer if their lethargic play persists.
Pastrnak, as lethal of a sniper as there is in the league today, has suddenly run out of ammo.
For Marchand, the venerable captain coming off three offseason surgeries, it appears the more than 1,000 games he’s played in his career have caught up to his 36-year-old body.
Goalie Jeremy Swayman, who hassled the Bruins for an eight-year, $8.25 million per season pay raise all summer, has barely been worth the veteran minimum. The same can be said of other high-priced signings Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov as well.
All told Sweeney and Co. have invested more than $86 million into this roster, and it’s so far been a rip-off.
“It starts with our compete level, I think it always starts with the compete level first and foremost,” Marchand said following Monday’s blowout loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets. “In this league, you have to have the highest compete every night if you want to be a good team.”
Players who achieved new statistical benchmarks last season, such as Charlie Coyle, Morgan Geekie, Pavel Zacha, and Trent Frederic, are not only far off from attaining those same heights but are all on pace to have some of the worst years of their careers.
Charlie McAvoy and Brandon Carlo, longtime backbones on the back end, have shown little resistance to pressure from opposing offenses. Even young players like Mason Lohrei and Matthew Poitras have made major regressions.
In the end, it was all too much for Montgomery to solve, and now the Bruins are seeing if Sacco and find the solution.
Boston’s new head coach is its third in the last two and a half years and the fourth under Sweeney in his nine seasons as the team’s general manager.
If the Bruins don’t correct course from here, Sweeney and many of the others who remain may find themselves next to Montgomery in the unemployment line.
