Jim Montgomery’s Bruins: The Full NHL Coaching Experience in 2+ Seasons
Montgomery's saga in Boston crammed the highs and lows of being a hockey coach into an incredibly compressed timeframe.
Hockey coaches are used to life coming at them fast. Research shows that the average tenure for an NHL head coach is just 2.4 seasons — compared with 3.6 for their counterparts in the NFL and 3.8 for managers in MLB.1 Occupational hazards for NHL coaches include failing to meet preseason expectations, working for a different general manager than the one who hired you, or even simply being on the job for three or more years. After all, it’s a restless business.
But few bench bosses have packed the entire experience of coaching in the NHL into a shorter time period than former Boston coach Jim Montgomery, who was fired by the Bruins on Tuesday after a 5-1 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets brought the team’s record to a disappointing 8-12 on the young season.
Montgomery ended up coaching just 184 total games with the Bruins, or 2.2 full seasons — somehow less than the average for one of the most endangered professions in pro sports.
He came to Boston after the team fired Bruce Cassidy, who had been with the franchise for six seasons, with a worse record than Montgomery ended up having (though he did guide a Stanley Cup Finals appearance in 2019, which fell just short). Cassidy was not known as a player’s coach, and Montgomery was viewed as a breath of fresh air for his kinder, gentler approach. Montgomery was also grateful to the Bruins for a second chance, after alcoholism had ruined his first NHL coaching gig with the Dallas Stars.
The change in scenery for both coach and team paid dividends right away. Though some pundits believed Cassidy’s departure from a veteran Bruins team (which had ranked 20th in average age and was only getting older) signaled the need for Boston to rebuild, they instead embarked on one of the most remarkable single-season performances in hockey history.
When all was said and done, the Bruins had set records for the most points in a season (135) and most wins in a season (65) during Montgomery’s first year at their helm. Though the team suffered a truly shocking collapse against the eventual East champion Florida Panthers in Round 1 of the playoffs, Boston’s wildly successful regular season earned Montgomery the Jack Adams Award for the NHL’s best coach.
And despite all of the warning lights flashing around heavy regression for Boston in 2023-24, the aging Bruins weathered the losses of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejčí enough to claim the No. 2 seed in the Atlantic Division and still rank ninth in the league in SRS. The Bruins also survived a close first-round matchup with their forever-victims, the Toronto Maple Leafs, before falling to the (this time eventual Cup champion) Panthers in six.
The 2024-25 Bruins have been wobbly, though. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Boston’s longstanding formula of a suffocating defense and stalwart goaltending has completely fallen apart, a shocking sight to behold. Worse still, the team’s offense entered Wednesday ranked 31st in the league in scoring, ahead of only the Chicago Blackhawks. You know things are going badly when Cole Koepke is your second-best player by Goals Above Replacement early on.
In that sense, Montgomery probably did need to go. The Bruins were unfocused, undisciplined and un-Bruin-like early this year. For a team that went into the season harboring Stanley Cup aspirations — and who just signed goalie Jeremy Swayman to a big contract extension on the eve of the opener — Boston needs to see if it can salvage this season, which still has a coin-flip’s playoff odds and a 1 percent Cup probability.
But in other ways, Montgomery is the ultimate avatar for the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world of high-level coaching.
Montgomery’s team won 112 games in his first two seasons with Boston, or 68 percent of the time. The GM who hired him, Don Sweeney, was still in charge — usually a positive indicator for job security. (Sweeney has now churned through three highly successful Bruins coaches: Claude Julien, who won the team its most recent Cup in 2011; Cassidy, who won the Cup for Vegas after the Bruins let him go; and Montgomery.) Just 513 days before being fired, Montgomery was receiving the Adams trophy at the NHL’s awards banquet.
That last item actually might be the kiss of death for a coach — roughly half of recipients are fired within three seasons of being named the NHL’s best bench boss. It’s a familiar story in the coaching world: Elevated expectations become more difficult to meet, which leads to a sense of failure and, ultimately, dismissal.
But these arcs still tend to play out on a longer timescale than the rapid decline Montgomery just experienced. For instance, Daily Faceoff found that, from 2012-13 through 2021-22, the average Jack Adams recipient lasted 2.3 additional seasons following his award win. Montgomery just did a speedrun of that, sticking around for only 1.2 additional seasons after 2022-23.
Once again, that’s the business. Perhaps new interim Bruins coach Joe Sacco, himself a victim of the coaching carousel in Colorado a decade ago, can help turn Boston’s season around. But just about the only certainty in NHL coaching is that you will eventually be relieved of your duties, no matter how well your team is doing in the moment. Montgomery found that out the hard way — falling from the high to the low at near-record speeds.
The NBA was basically the same as the NHL, at 2.3 seasons.
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As for Boston, on average how many head coaches does it take to figure out where your new $66MM goaltender lies on the luck/skill curve? About 3.2 head coaches as I understand it.😏