Bruins Need to Consider Replacing Sweeney After Montgomery Firing – The Hockey Writers Latest News, Analysis & More

The Boston Bruins have parted ways with head coach Jim Montgomery following a frustrating game against the Columbus Blue Jackets where they lost 5-1 and dropped below .500 with an 8-9-3 record. It was clear that a change needed to be made and replacing the head coach is the easiest and quickest option to go with at this point. 

Despite the lethargic and uninspiring start to the 2024-25 season, Montgomery leaves his tenure in Boston with a .715 win percentage and 120 wins in a little over two seasons. He navigated the team through two seasons where expectations were very low coming in, only for them to be a top team in the NHL. While he had run out of options for ways to get the Bruins going this season, there is no reason why he won’t be a top candidate for any coaching job around the league next summer.

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Firing Montgomery won’t cure all the issues with this current team. Sure, new blood and leadership can help (though who knows if that will truly happen with an internal hire like Joe Sacco), but that doesn’t solve the make-up of this roster that general manager Don Sweeney has constructed.

This is now the third head coach that has been fired since Sweeney began his tenure as GM in 2015. The first was Claude Julien in 2017, then Bruce Cassidy in 2022, and now Montgomery. At some point, the finger needs to turn from the coaching staff to the front office for the inability to get over the hump and win a Stanley Cup in the last decade. The question of Sweeney keeping his job was there when Cassidy was fired, and now it seriously needs to be discussed again in light of the team’s poor showing and another coach being let go.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Before delving into some reasons why the organization should consider parting ways with Sweeney, it is important to give credit where credit is due. He has certainly made a number of terrific trades in his tenure that brought in assets like Charlie Coyle and Pavel Zacha without really losing much. He’s been aggressive at the trade deadline when he has needed to. He has secured long-term deals with key roster pieces like David Pastrnak, Charlie McAvoy, and Hampus Lindholm, who has been their best defenseman so far this season and his current injury is going to be disastrous for the team to navigate in the coming weeks.

While I don’t think anyone would consider Sweeney a particularly good drafter, he has brought in some major pieces for the organization like McAvoy, Jeremy Swayman, Mason Lohrei, and Matthew Poitras. He has found some of his most success with picks outside of the first round in Lohrei, Poitras, Swayman, and Brandon Carlo, who was a 2015 second-round selection. 

Sweeney has been the GM for almost a decade, and overall, the team has a winning record in that time and performed better than expected. But, there has been no championship and for the first time in a long while, the Bruins are falling way below expectations.

Current State of the Bruins

Coaching can only do so much to cover up issues with the construction of the roster itself. To some degree, Sweeney’s lack of drafting abilities has contributed to the issues with the 2024-25 Bruins. In his tenure, the team has struggled to consistently draft and develop young talent, particularly at the center position. This has left them scrambling at the deadline or in free agency to bring in guys to round out their roster, and overpaying those players is a big reason why the team seems to constantly be having cap space issues. 

Granted, the Bruins have been competitors for most of Sweeney’s tenure, so their first-round picks, when they’ve had them, have usually come in the later rounds or been traded for pieces at the deadline to make a run into the postseason. While some of those trades hold up, others received more skepticism then and should be looked at with an even more discerning eye now. For example, the Bruins lost their first-round pick for the 2020 NHL Draft in a trade to bring in injury-prone Ondrej Kase from the Anaheim Ducks. Kase was not worth a first-round pick, but it had to be included to get the Ducks to take on an aged David Backes with a bad contract, a questionable one that Sweeney had made to begin with. Back in 2018, he also traded away a first-round pick and a top defenseman prospect, Ryan Lindgren, to the New York Rangers for an aging Rick Nash, in a move that really did not work out as planned.

Not every trade is going to work out, obviously, and being aggressive at the trade deadline is again, important when a team is a real competitor for the Stanley Cup. But for every time Sweeney has brought someone in at the deadline and it’s worked out, there’s been a trade where it didn’t, and now the organization is seeing some of the fallout of consistently bartering draft picks in an attempt to be competitive, leaving the team with few options coming from within the organization and forcing their hand to give away bloated contracts in free agency to compensate. The additional kicker is the fact that many of those free agent signings haven’t tended to be the talent the team needed.

The fact of the matter, Sweeney still hasn’t crafted a championship-winning team in his tenure. He’s had ten years, which is much longer than many GMs get, especially without winning a Stanley Cup. Right now, the team is a mess and there is only one person who can be blamed for the crafting of it. In theory, the Bruins should be way more talented than they are, but guys are not playing up to expectations and particularly, the two major contracts Sweeney signed this summer, are not looking good. Signing Elias Lindholm to a seven-year contract after a down year is not looking great right now and may end up becoming an albatross of a contract, not the first under Sweeney’s leadership. Nikita Zadorov is leading the team in penalty minutes with 46, 20 more than second-place, McAvoy (26), and most of them are not very good penalties and are leading to powerplay goals for opponents.

Additionally, while Sweeney addressed center and defensive depth this offseason, he let one of the Bruins’ top wingers, Jake DeBrusk, leave in free agency, and did nothing to replace him. So, it’s no wonder that the team is struggling out on the wing. Now, DeBrusk hasn’t had the greatest of seasons so far, but I’m sure many fans would take him over several of the current roster players.

When it comes to young players, Sweeney has made questionable decisions throughout his entire tenure. Many are still scratching their heads as to why 20-year-old Matthew Poitras was sent down to play with the Providence Bruins in the American Hockey League (AHL). Fabian Lysell, the team’s first-round pick in the 2021 NHL Draft, has yet to make his NHL debut, another eye-raising decision by the GM. These are just examples from this season. There have been many other moments of his tenure, as well as some questionable signings of older players being brought in during free agency to take up spots that could be earned by younger guys.

The Bruins right now are bad. Yes, they have time to right the ship, but the season can start slipping away from them very quickly in the next few weeks if they don’t get it together. Unfortunately, signs are not pointing to that happening. Some of the issues can definitely be chalked up to coaching. They have been sloppy and the special teams united, both the powerplay and penalty kill, have been atrocious. 

Eventually, though, the finger has to turn on the man who created this team, who has been doing so for almost 10 years without a Stanley Cup championship. Sweeney has continuously failed to restock the Bruins’ prospect pipeline or make the right decisions for the development of young players, failed to bring in the right talent through trades and free agency to win a championship, and has let important free agents walk without a plan to replace them. At this point, it’s a joke to even begin to think it’s just coaching that has created this mess of a season so far.

The Time Has Come for Sweeney

Personally, I believe that Sweeney should have gotten the boot over Cassidy back in 2022. Instead, he got an extension and Cassidy won the Stanley Cup the following season with the Vegas Golden Knights. The coaching changes have ultimately done little to change the end result of the Bruins, so now it’s really time for the team to move on and make changes to the front office.

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As the saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a sign of insanity. The Bruins have been doing just that for multiple seasons now. They continue to have the same issues on the roster with a lack of forward depth, continue to change up coaches, and get the same results. What makes anyone think that simply firing Montgomery is going to result in a real change or a Stanley Cup?

The organization should not stop at just Montgomery. While it may not happen during the 2024-25 season, and I do understand not wanting to cause too much disruption when there is still a shot this team makes the playoffs, the front office needs a change by the time the 2025-26 season gets underway 11 months from now. The Bruins can’t keep doing the same song and dance, and think that eventually it will get them the result they want. It’s time the organization takes a good hard look at replacing Sweeney, and in all honesty, team president Cam Neely should also be getting deserved scrutiny, and they need to figure it out while the current core group of players (Pastrnak, McAvoy, Swayman, Lindholm) are all still in their primes.