Boston Bruins

Bruins GM Sweeney Holds Flame To Players After Firing Montgomery

Published

3 weeks ago

November 20, 2024

BRIGHTON — Don Sweeney couldn’t stand by any longer.

The Boston Bruins have wallowed through a disparaging first month and a half of their season, and the general manager couldn’t let it continue, bringing him to what he called a “difficult decision” by firing Jim Montgomery as the team’s head coach on Tuesday.

But even though Montgomery is the one who took the fall for Boston’s bad start, Sweeney isn’t letting him get saddled with the blame.

“You can’t say that Monty came in and made a positive connection with players for two-plus seasons and then turn around and say they just tuned him out,” Sweeney said in front of a packed press room Wednesday morning at Warrior Ice Arena. “They haven’t performed to the level they need to. That’s as simplistic as I can say. Monty is a good coach, and his communication skills are outstanding, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t translating to the players’ side.”

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Sweeney wanted to believe the Bruins would eventually return to form.

Since the start of the season, he’s tolerated embarrassing losses. He’s bitten his tongue while watching the players meander through games haphazardly, piling critical mistakes on top of one another.

What Sweeney couldn’t take anymore was that it hadn’t stopped. Try as they might, the Bruins can’t get out of their own way.

“We had a small incremental bump in terms of playing the right way, but we couldn’t maintain it, even in the course of games,” said Sweeney. “That’s just part of the things that bother me as a general manager when our team can’t stay as close-knit as they’ve been. They can’t get through the adversity piece within a game, and they can’t respond from game to game.”

“The bottom line is we’re not a hardout right now. We’re self-destructing at times. We need to be a harder out, and that’s a testament to what the fanbase expects.”

The worst part of it all for Sweeney was watching numerous players, many of which previously excelled under Montgomery, suddenly become shells of themselves. To a man, nearly every Bruins player has experienced a drop in production this season.

“It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that you’ve got, I don’t know, maybe upwards of 10 players off from where their norms would be and not even their high side of things if you go back a year ago,” Sweeney said. “That’s concerning. It’s a lot of the same personnel, which is confusing at times why we’re not executing. It’s team-wide, and that’s where it’s confounding to me when looking at every little area of our group. We need to be better, from our structure on out. We need to make sure our players understand that that’s not the standard.”

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But as the old adage goes, Sweeney can’t fire the players. All he can do is hold the fire to them.

Unfortunatley, that meant Montgomery getting burned in the process.

“When you take the job, you know that you’re on notice,” said Sweeney. “When you make recommend changes, they can say no, and you might be the change, so you face that. You make decisions based on experience and what you need to do for your hockey club, and that’s how I do the job. I’m appreciative in this case that they still let me make that decision and I’m disappointed it wasn’t moving forward with Monty.”