Who is to blame for the Bruins current mess? Sweeney deserves his share appeared first on NBC Sports Boston
The Boston Bruins were in dire need of a major change, and that move finally happened on Tuesday when the team announced it had fired head coach Jim Montgomery.
He will be temporarily replaced by assistant coach Joe Sacco.
Montgomery deserved better, but someone had to take the fall for what was a disastrous start to the 2024-25 season for the Original Six franchise. The Bruins entered Tuesday with an 8-9-3 record in the second wild-card playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. It’s almost a miracle they’re not lower in the table given how badly the team played.
The list of problems plaguing this team is long. The offense was lackluster in every aspect. Béčko scores 2.40 goals per game, which is the second lowest average in the league. The power play is in last place with a success rate of 11.7 percent. The penalty kill ranks 26th. The goaltending — a consistent strength of the team for nearly a decade — posted an .883 save percentage (25th). Franchise goaltender Jeremy Swayman, who signed an eight-year, $64 million contract before the season, played far below expectations.
Perhaps worst of all, it was a boring hockey team. Low scoring, low energy, low level of competition – things we haven’t said about Bruins teams in a long time.
Montgomery obviously deserves some blame for what happened. He hasn’t gotten the most out of his players – many of whom have thrived in his system over the past two years. His line combos didn’t work. The team went long stretches without getting many shots on net. Discipline has also been a major issue, as evidenced by the Bruins’ league-leading 91 minor penalties (14 more than any other team).
The craziest condition of all? The Bruins have already lost five games by four or more goals this season.
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But most of the blame shouldn’t fall on Montgomery. Only four or five players on this team played as expected (or better). The top players, with the exception of defender Hampus Lindholm, all underperformed. And if the Bruins are going to turn their season around, the players need to lead the offense.
Another person who deserves blame is general manager Don Sweeney.
The roster he assembled has real flaws. This is no longer a small sample. We’re 20 games in and the same issues – poor special teams, penalties, bad third periods, etc. – are repeated over and over again.
Instead of prioritizing speed and skill in the offseason, Sweeney decided to bolster his roster and make it one of the toughest and tallest in the league entering Opening Night. Sure, the Bruins have pushed the Florida Panthers at times in their last two playoff games, but the big problem in those series has been the lack of scoring for Boston.
Béčko, for example, scored two or fewer goals in each of the last five games against the Panthers in last season’s second-round playoff series. They lost four of those five games.
David Pastrňák is the only elite forward in the team. He led the B’s with 110 points last season – at least 43 more than any of his teammates. Only one player – Lightning star Nikita Kucherov – led his team in scoring with more points. Too much of the scoring burden is on Pastrňák. The roster lacks quality offensive depth.
Instead of favoring a legitimate top six goal scorer in free agency, Sweeney used most of the Bruins’ salary cap space to sign center Elias Lindholm to a seven-year, $54.25 million contract and defenseman Nikita Zadorov to a six-year, $30 million contract. million dollar deal. Both contracts look like overpayments at the moment.
Lindholm collected five points in the first three games of the season. Since then, he has not scored a goal in 17 games. Critics of the Lindholm signing — for the record, we thought it was a good move at the time — argued that he had steadily declined offensively in recent years and that there was little evidence to suggest a meaningful turnaround was likely. Lindholm had a breakout season in 2021-22, scoring 42 goals and 40 assists as a member of the Calgary Flames. He has 39 goals in the last two seasons combined.
Lindholm wasn’t a top-six center that generated high-level offense. If that doesn’t change, the next six seasons in which he hit $7.75 million could be a burden on the team.
The signing of Zadorov was also terrible. He’s never been the most disciplined player, but he leads the league in minor penalties among defensemen with 13. His defense isn’t great either, and he doesn’t provide much offense (zero goals in 19 games). He often tries to do too much instead of making a simple play.
It’s still early days, but Lindholm and Zadorov are on track to join Sweeney’s long list of swings and misses in free agency.
What’s worse for the Bruins is that they don’t have many Class A trade assets. Sweeney deserves a lot of blame for that as well. Boston’s prospect pool has been ranked at the bottom of the league for several years. There are no highly touted prospects to save the day. Sweeney traded first-round picks in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023, in addition to other second-, third- and later-round picks that were dealt.
Most of these trades were made to give the Bruins better depth for the playoffs. If the Bruins had drafted better under Sweeney, some of these trades might not have needed to be made.
In fairness, Sweeney has put together some very good rosters since taking over as the B’s general manager in 2015. The Bruins have been constantly in the mix during his tenure. They have made the playoffs in each of the last eight seasons. They even made it to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals in 2019. But that was the only team that advanced past the second round under Sweeney. The Bruins set NHL records for wins and team points in a single regular season in 2022-23 before losing in the first round.
Montgomery is the third head coach Sweeney has fired as general manager. Claude Julien was fired in 2017. Bruce Cassidy was fired after the 2022 playoffs and won the Stanley Cup the following season with the Vegas Golden Knights. How many coaches will allow Sweeney to fire? At some point, the assembly line-up must be thoroughly examined.
There is still time for the Bruins to turn things around. Sweeney can still update the roster before the March 7 trade deadline. Remarkably, they are still in the playoffs to this day. However, if the season continues to spiral out of control, more significant changes will need to be made.