If Jim Montgomery does get canned, it won’t be hard to know what Don Sweeney and Cam Neely were thinking.
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Jim Montgomery already was set for a meaningful week. A
Tuesday game with the Bruins in St. Louis, where he began his pro playing career, and a Thursday one in Dallas, where the Stars hired and
fired himfrom his first NHL head coaching job.
But there’s a lot more than nostalgia at stake for the third-year Boston coach, whose team has been so uneven through its first 16 games that management has to be wondering if he is the right man to lead them out of their malaise.
That’s how it goes in pro sports. You can’t fire a roster, but you can swap out a coach when it needs a midseason spark. If Montgomery takes the fall, it won’t be hard to know what Don Sweeney and Cam Neely were thinking.
It’s just as easy to wonder whether a coaching change will fix the mess the front office helped create, stocking a jumble full of mismatched puzzle pieces rather than a cohesive group.
Might a new voice — Joel Quenneville, Joe Sacco, Jay Leach — reach the players in ways Montgomery’s isn’t? The trick has been done before in Boston, where Montgomery was hired after a quick offseason hook of the statistically successful, but apparently too rough with his criticism Bruce Cassidy. The same place Cassidy’s discipline was valued enough that he was moved up to replace the fired Claude Julien in February 2017.
Each move paid immediate dividends. Cassidy made it all the way to a
Stanley Cup Game 7 in 2019, and Montgomery
won one Presidents’ Trophy and made the playoffs in each of his first two years. But you know how those ended: a stunning
seven-game meltdown against Florida in the first round two years ago, and a seven-game escape against Toronto in last year’s first round only to get
bombarded in Round 2 by those pesky Panthers.
Who can forget the countless too-many-men penalties or the desultory first periods, three measly shots combined in potential clinchers in Games 5 and 6, that did not reflect well on the coach? Who knows if Montgomery would even be here had the Bruins not pulled out the
Game 7 overtime win against the Leafs?
Fast forward another season and it’s obvious the Bruins are still looking for a spark. For all Montgomery has tried —
jawing at his captain Brad Marchand on the bench, parking his top scorer David Pastrnak for an entire third period — nothing yet has delivered the kind of consistency he needs from the players.
He keeps on trying, opening Monday’s practice with a lighthearted version of hockey-style dodgeball in which he evaded pucks being shot at him from the opposite side wall. Anything to break the tension of players gripping their sticks just a bit too tightly.
“It’s what I believe in, that there are different ways to get people to believe you’re in it together,” he told reporters Monday. “I always believe that humor/care is a better way to free the creative mind than, ‘Work harder.’ ”
On a serious note, Montgomery referenced a stress-busting team meeting before players hit the ice, and emphasized the intensity and detail of the supersized effort once they were out there.
“We were going to practice longer because we need more reps because our execution isn’t where we need it to be,” he said.
No kidding.
From big-money defenseman Charlie McAvoy, demoted off the top power play unit, to free agent defenseman Nikita Zadorov, yet to deliver on the promise of a ferocious forecheck. From newly-minted goalie Jeremy Swayman, still looking for a signature stand-on-my-head-I’ll-win-this-alone performance, to hopeful future star Matt Poitras, newly demoted to Providence. From the aforementioned Pastrnak, who headed to St. Louis looking to break a seven-game goalless streak, to hometown favorite Charlie Coyle, all but invisible.
The culprits are everywhere. They were nowhere
on Saturday night, a performance that really turned the discussion on Montgomery’s future into something more ominous.
Maybe we’ll eventually look back on that third-period 0-fer as rock bottom. Maybe the aftermath of the team’s embarrassing inability to generate even one shot across the entire final stanza of their loss to the Senators will be the alarm bell that finally woke them up.
“We know we have to do much better than we’ve shown,” Pastrnak said Monday. “We have to be confident in ourselves and in the team. We know we have good players. We need to be confident and go out there and make plays and trust ourselves.”
Something has to change, because if it doesn’t, Montgomery — in the final year of his three-year contract — might pay the price with his job.
