Jim Montgomery firing shows how difficult it can be to be an NHL coach
The 2023-24 NHL campaign saw a flurry of NHL coaches be fired during the season, as teams that struggled early in the year were desperate to find a spark and get back on track.
On Tuesday, Jim Montgomery became the first coach to be relieved of their duties, as the Boston Bruins’ bench boss scuffled their way to an 8-9-3 start and had just loss their third straight game, a 5-1 shellacking to the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Despite leading the Bruins to the best regular-season record in NHL history in 2022-23, winning the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year, the club struggled to find playoff success, blowing a 3-1 lead to the Florida Panthers in the first round that year, then nearly blowing another 3-1 lead to the Toronto Maple Leafs a year later before being trounced by the Panthers again.
On Wednesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk discuss Montgomery’s firing and where the Bruins go from here.
Tyler Yaremchuk: Montgomery is a guy who wins a heckuva lot more than he loses, and if you look at his 120-41-23 record with the Bruins, it’s absolutely sparkling, but the lifeless start to the year was too much.
Frank Seravalli: He had 184 games coached in Boston, and 41 losses in regulation. A .750 winning percentage. This is when you start to see reaction from the coaching fraternity, with Toronto Maple Leafs’ head coach Craig Berube, who had Montgomery as an assistant with the St. Louis Blues for a couple years, saying “This one hurts, I feel for coaches all the time, but I take this one a little personal.”
I got multiple messages from current NHL head coaches that basically said, “Man, what a business. It doesn’t matter how the players play, the blame is almost never placed on management or the front office. It’s always the coach’s head to roll.”
I’m not saying that everything that happened this season with Montgomery was perfect, but it’s 2024, but 2023 and 2022, there’s three finalists for the Jack Adams, and all six have been fired. All of them are fired. Goodnight, you’re now working for another team.
How?! How does that work? How does a .750 winning percentage not enough? Maybe we should have seen the writing on the wall, the fact that Montgomery had averaged 120-something points over his first two years with Boston, but didn’t have an extension going into the 2024-25 season. In a lot of ways, it felt like this was untenable. There’s tons of noise about the coach, lifeless starts, he’s essentially gone after all the big name pieces, whether it’s Brad Marchand or David Pastrnak in the playoffs, or now most recently saying something about Jeremy Swayman and the goaltending.
Look, a lot of things have gone wrong in Boston this season, but they’re still just 8-9-3, two wins from second or third place in the division, and yet, we’ve got a coaching change. Sometimes it feels cruel, and they got the wrong guy.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…