The Boston Bruins’ disappointing 4-5-1 start combined with Jim Montgomery being in the last year of his contract has sparked speculation about whether the head coach is on the hot seat.
If you think he is or should be, then it’s fair to wonder if a coaching change could be coming soon if things start to snowball. Rich Keefe, aka “Scoops Keefe,” said as much on Jones & Keefe Thursday, saying that he has heard Montgomery is in fact “on the hot seat.”
“If things don’t get turned around, I think he’s done,” Keefe said. “They need to turn it around. He’ll be the first casualty, I guess, of a really slow start.”
Mike Milbury has been critical of Montgomery in the past, but during his weekly appearance on The Greg Hill Show on Thursday, he said he actually would not be on board with firing Montgomery right now. Listen to the full interview above.
“The last two years, they played some pretty damn good hockey for a long time. … I may have issues with his approach and that sort of thing, but I think it would be unfair right now,” Milbury said. “I think this is on personnel more than the coach. But what he’s doing now, getting tougher and meaner and nastier, adapting to the situation, is difficult for players who have been there a while, when your coach changes his stripes. It’s a tough pill to swallow for some of the veteran players, but I give him credit for trying. I don’t think this is on him. I think this is on personnel.”
As Milbury alluded to, Montgomery has left his “players’ coach” label behind recently, berating captain Brad Marchand on the bench in Utah last week and cussing out his team multiple times during Wednesday’s practice as their pace remained too slow for his liking.
Montgomery has also shuffled his lines on an almost daily basis, with the biggest shakeup yet coming on Wednesday when he finally split up David Pastrnak and Elias Lindholm (a combination that has not yet clicked) while also moving each member of his fourth line (the Bruins’ best line through 10 games) to a new line.
“Obviously he’s doing whatever he can to rearrange things so that they can get some sort of spark, because they don’t have any,” Milbury said. “They’re not a puck possession team, and they’re not a crash-and-bang team because they can’t get there fast enough. I have to say, if you’re the architect of this collection right now, you have to be wondering, ‘Where did I go wrong? And where did our staff go wrong?’”
Milbury believes general manager Don Sweeney and the front office sacrificed too much speed in order to get bigger, unless the players are somehow just out of shape. If it is a conditioning issue, that’s something Montgomery could still help to change.
“Absolutely,” Milbury said when asked if the Bruins got slower. “And that’s on not just Don Sweeney, but his staff. This is a scouting staff and management issue right now, unless there’s something internally that’s gone wrong. And what could that be? … I would look at conditioning. Are they in shape? That’s a thing you can control as a coach. We talked about discipline before. That’s a thing you can control as a coach.
“And conditioning and discipline are intertwined, because if they’re taking stupid hooking and holding penalties because they can’t get there, maybe they’re not in shape to get there. Right now, he [Montgomery] doesn’t have much in his bag of tricks to go to, but he can control conditioning and he can control, to a certain extent, discipline.”