Jim Montgomery was not unemployed for long. The St. Louis Blues announced on Sunday morning that they have fired Drew Bannister and hired Montgomery to replace him as head coach.
The Boston Bruins fired Montgomery on Tuesday amid a sluggish start through 20 games, a stretch that bottomed out with an embarrassing 5-1 loss to the lowly Columbus Blue Jackets on Monday.
The Bruins replaced Montgomery with Joe Sacco, who was named interim head coach, and have won two straight games since.
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The Blues, who are off to an even worse start, will be hoping to get a similar bump from the switch to Montgomery, whom they signed to a five-year contract. St. Louis has lost seven of its last nine games following a 3-1 loss to the New York Islanders on Saturday.
The Blues immediately seemed like the perfect fit for Montgomery's next job. St. Louis is the place where he broke into the NHL as a player and where he met his wife. They still own a home there and spent their offseasons there, and will now make the move back full-time.
Montgomery also spent two seasons as an assistant coach in St. Louis from 2020-22 before taking the Bruins job, working under Craig Berube and earning rave reviews from young franchise cornerstones like Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou.
In retrospect, it is interesting to note that the Blues did not extend Bannister until May 7 this past spring, three days after the Bruins knocked off the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round. With rumors swirling that Boston would have fired Montgomery then had they lost the series, it certainly appears that the Blues may have been waiting to see if that happened. Now they get Montgomery six months later and fire Bannister, who had another year on his contract after this one.
Assuming no other changes to the Blues' staff, Montgomery will team up with another former Bruins coach, Claude Julien, who is an assistant in St. Louis. Montgomery also joins Julien as the third straight coach fired by the Bruins to land another head coaching job within a week. Julien went right to Montreal after getting fired in 2017, and Bruce Cassidy landed in Vegas six days after his firing in 2022.
Montgomery went 120-41-23 in two-plus seasons as Bruins head coach. His .715 points percentage ranked third in franchise history behind only Tom Johnson (1970-73) and Bep Guidolin (1973-74).