Some years ago, yours truly was in the bowels of the then-Dunkin’ Donuts Center after the Providence Bruins lost a game in which they were, frankly, manhandled by a manlier team.
Regular season, playoffs, I don’t remember, and I honestly cannot remember if Jay Leach was still coaching the P-Bruins at the time – might have been Ryan Mougenel. Some things you just don’t commit to memory, but there are also things that you never forget.
I was waiting on the coach to emerge for a postgame chat with the small media contingent outside the dressing room when a couple of NHL Bruins assistants stopped by and we said hi. In discussing the game just played, I soft-peddled the mismatch aspect of the defeat and characterized the P-Bruins’ effort as – I forget the exact words – valiant and unlucky.
“Oh, is that what happened out there?” said Joe Sacco, cross-examining my assessment.
Sacco had no interest in my B.S. The P-Bruins got rag-dolled out there, and I could feel his disappointment in my sugar-coated comment. Somehow, that stuck with me. Now I can finally look forward to new comments from Sacco that will, hopefully, supplant that one-part-funny, two-parts-embarrassing memory.
Jim Montgomery put up an historic record two years ago and overachieved with lesser personnel last season, but a chaotic and disjointed, 20-game start to the current season has cut short his tenure as coach of the Bruins.
Today’s announcement that the Boston Bruins have fired Jim Montgomery and named Sacco interim coach (full practice 11 am Wednesday at Warrior, after which Sacco, General Manager Don Sweeney and “select players” will address the attending media) arrives with a curious set of questions on this end.
Twenty-four hours ago, I’d decided that Montgomery’s employment could only survive Tuesday’s 5-1 loss to Columbus for one of two hypothetical reasons: 1. The Bruins’ brass had already decided to give it until Thanksgiving until the ship is either righted or considered iceberg bound; 2. The Bruins extended Montgomery, kept it quiet (presumably until they go on the winning streak that never materialized), only to have Mr. Jacobs disallow a coaching change (rather than pay two coaches).
I still don’t know or assume an answer to these curiosities. I can only say that Sweeney told a preseason press gathering that extension talks were underway. That was then. Whatever Montgomery’s contractual status at the quarter pole of the season, the Bruins have determined that the season will likely be lost without a coaching change. And so it is.
Coaching is a results business.
I wondered if Leach, the new assistant on the Montgomery’s bench echoing Bruce Cassidy’s 2016-17 promotion from the AHL Bruins to Claude Julien’s bench, would leapfrog Sacco and be running this team starting Wednesday. I can only imaging the internal, long-table debate inside the Bruins’ brain trust. I imagined Mougenel being promoted to assist Leach, Trent Whitfield coaching the P-Bruins, and Sacco joining Monty in the unemployment line.
You just never know, but such a scenario even after the season becomes far less likely with Sacco’s promotion from associate coach to head coach. If he gets this thing turned around, the Bruins rally, make the playoffs and win a round or two, it’s most likely he’ll be offered the permanent position. If they don’t, then all bets are off. A management shakeup is a postseason consideration, and a new GM invariably means a new coaching staff.
As sure as you can’t fire 20 players so the coach has to take the fall, that’s how it works in the executive suites as well.
Bruins management will get roasted for social-media posts thanking Monty and wishing him and his family well, but this is the painful paradox of the business.
To a man, the top half of the Bruins returning lineup inexplicably showed up unready for the 2024-25 season and still managed to grind out a NHL-.500 type of mark (8-9-3, albeit outside the playoff eight), so mass hysteria calling on social media for a roster blow-up could not be further from the mark.
First off, how many teams overachieve one year (2023-24), fill holes with two big free-agent signings and a major trade, start the next season poorly and, rather than make a coaching change, break up the room? Right, zero.
It’s a two-level question, so to clarify I think it’s not only unrealistic to expect management to trade core players right now, I think it’s ridiculous to determine in 20 games that a GM whose teams had averaged 51 wins per 82 games since hiring his own coach (Cassidy in Feb. 2017) should be axed right now.
Postseason is another question. Should these Bruins miss the playoffs, then Sweeney will ironically face a similar quandary to the one that ended Peter Chiarelli’s nine-season tenure, especially the lack of draft capital and an impactful farm system. At the end of this season, Sweeney will have had 10 seasons in charge.
I digress.
Of course, another coach is going to get a shot at this roster, which on paper is an improvement over the 2023-24 version that challenged for the Presidents Trophy and Atlantic Division title and won neither but did win a round of the playoffs.
Joe Sacco is the ninth Bruins coach appointed as an in-season replacement.
What can Sacco learn from the first 20 games of the season?
What stood out here was, as each underperforming returning player has scratched and clawed his way into better form, a sense of linear, teamwide progress became evident.
Then Hampus Lindholm was injured blocking a shot, and forward momentum was lost.
Sacco has his work cut out.
Center Mark Kastelic, the revelation in the Linus Ullmark trade, has a lower-body injury. It seems that, ever since Montgomery split up Kastelic, Johnny Beecher and Cole Koepke to sprinkle their magic throughout the top three lines, that fourth-line trio has not been the same.
Sacco has his work cut out.
The warts that the Bruins had hoped were behind them (including their uncharacteristically poor special teams) have reared their ugly heads on any given night. Individual players who, it seemed, had turned the corner on their personal seasons, are once again looking like they did skating in October’s sand.
Montgomery had done some good work in getting the Bruins into a better place, same for captain Brad Marchand and alternates David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy. Then Hampus went out of the lineup, then Kastelic.
It’s always something. Two short-handed goals against. Andrew Peake was not himself upon his return, but he’ll be better. But every little thing that can go wrong for the Bruins seems to hold a strange power over this team like little parts of a perfect storm, one that Montgomery could not outrun.
The progress points were there, then they weren’t. Some nights, the setbacks were easy to understand, some nights they were inexplicable and mind-boggling.
Sacco has his work cut out.
Other questions:
Will the coaching change hasten the return of center Matt Poitras from Providence? By my perspective, Montgomery desperately needed to connect one forward line to the next, and the best way to accomplish that was to move Pavel Zacha, his best forward so far this season, to center so his tenacious, two-way effort could affect more of the game.
The move leveraged Charlie Coyle back to the bottom six and marginalized Poitras to the point it makes far more sense for him to hone his skills in the AHL, where the great David Krejci developed his game at the same exact age (20).
What Sacco does about these personnel wrinkles he has inherited is anyone’s guess, and I’m even more intrigued as to whether he will alter the team’s playing style.
Will he become the third straight successor to basically inherit Julien’s zone defense or are radical system changes in order? Offensively, will the Bruins abandon the puck-possession game they played under Montgomery and go back to more of a shot-volume game as espoused by former coach Bruce Cassidy?
Based on Sacco’s comments upon his hire to coach the Colorado Avalanche in 2009-10, he believes in the game as the Bruins have been trying to trend it. Aggressive and high-paced.
And now the Bruins will begin deciding as a group if Sacco will coach them beyond this season.
Rink Rap with Mick Colageo 