Bruins fire head coach Jim Montgomery, but problems run deeper

It was probably a necessary move given their underwhelming start (8-9-3 through 20 games) and consistent regression from his first year with the team in 2021-22. Especially given how poorly the team has played over the past week, with Monday’s 5-1 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets being an especially bad performance. 

Even if it is necessary, it is far from a cure all for the Bruins. Nor is Montgomery probably the person in need of being made the scapegoat for the team’s struggles.

That should fall on general manager Don Sweeney, who has not only assembled the flawed roster that is not winning, but has also gone through several head coaches during his tenure as the team’s general manager.

With Tuesday’s firing of Montgomery, Sweeney has already fired three head coaches in his eight years as the team’s GM, having previously fired Claude Julien and Bruce Cassidy, who went on to win the Stanley Cup one year later with the Vegas Golden Knights.

If a team is in a position where it has to make that many coaching changes in that short of a period of time, with the same general manager running the show, it might be time to start asking questions about the job that GM is doing. Especially when that GM has not won a championship and is more than five years removed from his only Stanley Cup Final appearance. 

On one hand, the Bruins have been an objectively good team during that time. They have made the playoffs eight years in a row and in Montgomery’s first year tied an NHL record with 65 regular season wins, with an underwhelming first-round exit from the playoffs. They followed that up with 51 wins a year ago. 

A lot of teams would take that sort of success. 

Where the success has stopped has been in the playoffs, especially the past three seasons where they have won just a single playoff round. 

While the overall record has been fine, there are severe flaws with the roster that Sweeney has not adequately addressed, while also creating more. There has been an element of smoke-and-mirrors to some of the recent success. 

The retirement of Patrice Bergeron a couple of years ago left the Bruins without a true No. 1 center that could make an impact. He attempted to fill that hole this offseason by signing Elias Lindholm to a massive seven-year, $54M contract. While Lindholm is a good player, he is just another version of what they already had at center in Pavel Zacha and Charlie Coyle — a good player that is not going to be “the guy” on a contending team.

The Bruins’ traditionally strong defense has also taken a big hit in recent years and become far too reliant on goaltending to bail the team out. Sweeney added to that problem in free agency by overpaying for Nikita Zadorov, and then being forced to trade half of his elite goalie duo when he sent Linus Ullmark to the Ottawa Senators (a division rival) due to salary cap constraints. 

Salary cap constraints he helped cause. 

He followed that by playing hardball with the other goalie, Jeremy Swayman, in restricted free agency contract negotiations resulting in him missing training camp and the preseason. Swayman is now off to the worst start of his career and is no longer masking the defensive flaws. 

Sweeney’s roster is flawed. He is now on his fourth different head coach that has taken the fall for not producing the results he wants. At some point Bruins ownership needs to change its focus from the head coach to the person that keeps hiring (and firing) the head coaches and has built the flawed roster.