Don Sweeney has fired three coaches. If the Bruins GM can’t figure out how to improve this team, he might be next. - The Boston Globe
As the architect of a roster that is missing key pieces and struggling to jell with the ones that are here, Sweeney is as much on the hook as the man he fired.
www.bostonglobe.com
Don Sweeney has been the Bruins’ general manager since 2015. On Tuesday, he fired his third head coach since taking the job, again looking for a spark to awaken a slumbering, stumbling team.
No argument here after a 20-game sample of hideous hockey.
But here’s the hard truth Sweeney also faces: If this move doesn’t work, the next ax that falls has to be on him. There’s no fourth strike in baseball, nor should there be for coaching changes.
As Sweeney took his place in front of the media Wednesday, he took on all questions with candor and calmness. He was absolutely right in calling out his players, challenging them to play better, whether by a standard they set in Boston in previous years or whether by the standard they set elsewhere to earn big free agent deals to join the team. But as the architect of a roster that is missing key pieces and struggling to jell with the ones that are here, as the man behind too many unproductive drafts and not enough trade or draft capital left to work with, Sweeney is just as much on the hook for this mess as the man he fired.
This time it was Jim Montgomery taking the fall in favor of Joe Sacco, just as Bruce Cassidy once took the fall in favor of Montgomery, just as Claude Julien had been replaced by Cassidy. No surprise Sweeney went back to the same playbook, given its history of immediate payoff: Cassidy getting the Bruins to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final within two years, Montgomery winning a Presidents’ Trophy in his first season behind the bench.
Twenty games into this season, it’s obvious something had to change. The Bruins’ ugly stew of inconsistency (from period to period and from game to game), penchant for penalties, lack of execution, and overall malaise sealed Montgomery’s fate.
Now, we see if firing the coach works again.
“You hope you’re going to get a bounce of some kind. That’s what you expect. I certainly expect it,” Sweeney said. “I know what the pride level of our players is. I expect them to take ownership of where they are now and improve.
“If it doesn’t and we need to make personnel changes, that’s going to fall on me. Organizationally, it’ll be the same way.”
In other words, he knows who’s next in line for the chopping block.
“We’re always on notice,” Sweeney said. “The results are in this business, that’s just what you accept, when you take the job you know that you’re on notice. When you make recommended changes they could say no and you might be the change. You face that.
“You make decisions based on your experience level and what you need to do for your hockey club. That’s how I do the job. I’m appreciative they still let me make those decisions. I’m disappointed that that wasn’t moving forward with Monty.”
Sweeney could have done so much more to help the now-former coach, not the least of which avoiding the protracted and painful offseason negotiation with Jeremy Swayman. As the GM pinpointed training camp as showing the first signs of trouble, describing it as “flatlined,” the absence of Swayman was a huge part of the problem. If the Bruins were eventually going to capitulate and reset the NHL’s goalie salary market, why wait so long?
And even before spending the money on Swayman, who has yet to rediscover the shutdown form we saw in last season’s playoffs, it sure seems Sweeney could have made better use of the cash he freed up by trading Montgomery’s best security blanket, fellow goalie Linus Ullmark. Neither Elias Lindholm nor Nikita Zadorov are living up to their combined $84.25 million in free agent contracts, with very little hope they might duplicate the best free agent addition in this team’s recent memory, Zdeno Chara.
With the towering defenseman and former captain in mind, it’s hard not to see how unable Sweeney has been to re-create the core that established the Bruins’ identity for grit and toughness — Chara, Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, Tuukka Rask. Some decent attempts have come and gone, from Rick Nash to Tyler Bertuzzi to Dmitry Orlov to Taylor Hall, but these latest swings on Lindholm and Zadorov so far look like major misses, though the GM isn’t ready to admit it.
“I don’t think there’s a concern they’re not a good fit, they have not played to the level we expected them to,” Sweeney said. “From a fit standpoint, the identification that those are players that will help us, I’m not second-guessing where they are right now, I’m second-guessing the performance of them and their group.”
Again, absolutely right to insist they are not alone.
“It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that you’ve got upwards of 10 players off of what their norms would be, not even their high sides from a year ago. That’s concerning,” Sweeney said. “We’re not executing. And that again falls back on the players in a lot of ways.”
But it also falls back on him. Historically, the Bruins have fired only two GMs in the half-century of Jacobs family ownership, Mike O’Connell and Peter Chiarelli, the latter getting replaced by his then-assistant, Sweeney. Team president Cam Neely, a former Bruins teammate of Sweeney’s, might not relish the idea of firing his friend. But if not him, then who? You can’t fire an entire roster.
“These guys are more than capable of playing and executing and performing,” Sweeney said. ”That’s what we want to find. We want to find out what this team is capable of. Sixty games to go, that’s a lot of season. But you can’t stay in neutral.”
And you can’t wait forever. Not for a coach, and maybe for these Bruins, not for the GM.
