Jim Montgomery firing shows how difficult it can be to be an NHL coach

The 2023-24 NHL campaign saw a flurry of NHL coaches fired during the season as teams that struggled early in the year were desperate to find a spark and get back on track.

On Tuesday, Jim Montgomery became the first coach to be relieved of their duties, as Boston Bruins’ bench boss romped to an 8-9-3 start and had just lost their third game in a row, a 5-1 shellacking to Columbus blue jackets.

Despite leading the Bruins to the best record in NHL history in 2022-23 and winning the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year, the club struggled to find playoff success and carried a 3-1 lead to Florida Panthers in the first round that year, after which they almost blew another 3-1 lead Toronto Maple Leafs a year later before being hit again by the Panthers.

In Wednesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVEFrank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk discuss Montgomery’s firing and where the Bruins go from here.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Montgomery is a guy who wins a lot more than he loses, and if you look at his 120-41-23 record with the Bruins, it’s absolutely sparkling, but the lackluster start to the year was too much.

Frank Seravalli: He had 184 games coached in Boston and 41 losses in regulation. A winning percentage of .750. That’s when you start to see reactions from the coaching fraternity, when Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Craig Berube, who had Montgomery as an assistant at St. Louis Blues for a few years, said, “This one hurts, I feel for coaches all the time, but I take this a little bit personally.”

I got several messages from current NHL head coaches basically saying, “Man, what a business. It doesn’t matter how the players play, the blame is almost never placed on management or the front office. It’s always the coach’s head to roll.”

I’m not saying everything that happened this season with Montgomery was perfect, but it’s 2024, but 2023 and 2022, there are three finalists for Jack Adams and all six have been fired. Everyone gets fired. Good night, you are now working for a different team.

How?! How does it work? How is a .750 winning percentage not enough? Perhaps we should have seen the writing on the wall, the fact that Montgomery averaged 120-something points during his first two years with Boston but did not have an extension through the 2024-25 season. In many ways it felt like this was unsustainable. There’s tons of noise about the coach, lifeless starts, he’s basically gone after all the big names, whether it’s Brad Marchand or David Pastrnak in the playoffs, or most recently saying something about Jeremy Swayman and the goaltending.

Look, a lot of things have gone wrong in Boston this season, but they’re still just 8-9-3, two wins out of second or third place in the division, and yet we’ve got a coaching change. Sometimes it feels cruel and they got the wrong guy.

You can watch the full episode and the rest of the episode here…