Boston Bruins general manager Don Sweeney announced that the club has relieved head coach Jim Montgomery of his duties. Associate coach Joe Sacco will assume an interim head coach role. Montgomery’s ousting comes after a 5-1 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets on Monday. It was Boston’s third consecutive loss, and the 10th in their last 15 games. The Bruins have been outscored 51-to-28 in those games, good for a -23 goal differential – the worst in the NHL since October 19th.
To say Boston’s early season has fallen short of expectations would be an understatement. The team stands with an 8-9-3 record, and needed overtime to achieve half of their wins. No aspects of the lineup seem to be firing properly, with David Pastrnak (17) and Brad Marchand (13) the only Bruins to pass 10 points through 20 games – and even they’re scoring below their typical pace. Netminder Jeremy Swayman hasn’t been any better, with his .884 save percentage in 14 appearances outmatched by backup Joonas Korpisalo’s .901 in seven appearances. It’s been top-to-bottom struggles in Boston, sparking the first coach firing of the young season.
Montgomery will be replaced by Boston-native, and Boston University alum, Joe Sacco, who’s served on the Bruins bench since the 2014-15 season. Sacco worked under three different head coaches in that span – serving as an assistant up until this summer, when he received an aptly-timed promotion to associate coach. He’ll now take one step further, moving into his first head coaching role since 2012-13, when Sacco was fired after a four-year tenure with the Colorado Avalanche. He only led Colorado to the postseason once, in 2009-10 – his first year as an NHL head coach. He set a 43-30-9 record that year, only to fall to a dismal 88-104-21 record through his next three seasons. That includes a 16-25-7 record in the 2012-13, which paved way for Colorado to select Nathan MacKinnon first overall in the 2013 NHL Draft. Before his time in the NHL, Sacco achieved a 60-79-21 record across two seasons with the AHL’s Lake Erie Monsters.
But while past precedent may not shine favorably on Sacco, his decade in Boston has provided plenty of learning experience. He’s become known for overseeing Boston’s penalty-killing unit, which ranks as the second-most effective in the NHL over the last decade. More specifically, the Bruins have three separate seasons in the top 10 of penalty-killing percentage since 2014-15 – posting a second-ranked 87.3 percent in 2022-23, a seventh-ranked 86 percent in 2020-21, and a 10th-ranked 85.7 percent in 2016-17. That’s in large part thanks to Sacco, who amassed 738 career NHL games of his own – standing out as a stout defensive-forward. Those traits will come in handy for a Bruins team currently allowing the fourth-most goals in the league.
Meanwhile, Montgomery will now look for new work less than two seasons after leading Boston to a record 65 wins in 2022-23. The Bruins were promptly ousted in the first round of the postseason, but the year was nonetheless monumental. It ended in Linus Ullmark winning the Vezina Trophy, Patrice Bergeron – again – winning the Selke Trophy, and Montgomery winning the Jack Adams Trophy as coach of the year. Montgomery followed it with a very strong 47-20-15 record last season, commanding Boston through the loss of longtime lineup pillars Bergeron and David Krejčí and making it to the playoff’s second round.
Montgomery’s hockey roots run deep. He was a star at the University of Maine, captaining the team’s 1993 NCAA Championship run while serving strong opposite of Paul Kariya. He signed in the NHL as an undrafted free agent soon after and became a star scorer in the minor-leagues – amassing 328 points across eight years and 451 games in the AHL. He retired from an 11-year pro career in 2005 and didn’t take on his first head coach role until 2010 – but his winning tendencies quickly came back. Montgomery led the Dubuque Fighting Saints to the USHL Clark Cup in both 2010 and 2012 – earning a move step up to the University of Denver, where he won another NCAA Championship in 2017. He was hired by the Dallas Stars in 2018, and led the team to a 60-43-10 record, though he stepped down as head coach partway through the 2019-20 season. Still, his hockey resume is as strong as it comes, and it likely won’t be long before Montgomery finds himself once again commanding an NHL lineup.