Jim Montgomery cut off the question mid-stream.
“Jim, when you get let go like you did last year…”
“I got fired,” Montgomery said, smiling. “Call it what it is.”
Montgomery wasn’t being flippant or angry. He just chose not to euphemize what happened. The 2024-25 Bruins had high expectations and they weren’t meeting them early and he took the fall. He wasn’t let go. They didn’t part ways. He wasn’t relieved of duties.
He was fired.
Like most fired coaches, Montgomery didn’t speak to the Boston media before he left. Thursday was his first time playing in Boston in the over a year since he was fired. Meeting with the media meant reliving something unpleasant that he’s moved past.
There are a lot of coaches who would have given short answers while pivoting everything to the present and the future.
There are some who would have taken subtle or not-so-subtle shots at the roster he was given last year. But Montgomery was classy. He praised his former players and his former bosses, who’d fired him. He explained what he learned and how he’d grown.
“But for me, it’s always about the people, the great players, the management that I got an opportunity to work with,” he said. “Everybody here made me better in my opinion.”
In a difficult situation, he was pleasant, graceful and largely straightforward.
The Bruins lost to the Blues on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024. Boston fired him on Nov. 19 and on Nov. 24, the Blues fired Drew Bannister so they could hire Montgomery.
“It happened so quickly. I was still in the mode of, ‘Where did I go wrong? What did I do wrong?’ And then all of a sudden the phone rings and you got to start,” he said. “It helps you get over it quicker. But I still felt like it would have been healthy to have more time. It’s just the way my brain works.”
Montgomery got the news and immediately went to his kids’ school so they could hear the news from him, and he could prepare them for what would happen next.
“You have to go into that kind of mode in a great sports town like Boston. Boston, Philly, New York. I think right away you got to go protect your family. When I got the call, it was a little bit right around 2 o’clock and the first thing I did was I drove to my kids’ school. Like it’s a hard time, just is. And it’s not the fault of anyone. It’s the life we choose.”
Coaching is a strange business. Just 512 days since Montgomery won the Jack Adams Award for the NHL’s coach of the year, he was unemployed for not coaching well enough. Just three days after beating him, the Blues hired him.
The Bruins never got on track last season. Some of it was injuries. Some of it was the new players never really gelling with the established veterans on the ice. Montgomery couldn’t fix it. Neither could interim coach Joe Sacco and in March, management blew up the roster and started over.
Even after he got to St. Louis, Montgomery labored over what his role was in what went wrong in Boston.
“Yeah, of course I did. You always do. I think if you’re going to grow as a person, you have to realize, whether it’s your personal life or your professional life, what exactly you could have done better,” he said. “That’s what I look at. I don’t look at what others could have done better. I don’t control others.”
After answering 10 minutes of questions about the disappointing way things finished, Montgomery finished his press conference with kindness.
It’s pretty common when an athlete, or in this case a coach, returns to Boston for the first time for media to ask what restaurant they ate at. It’s a way to show what things in the city have made an impression on them during their time in Boston.
Montgomery ate at Bricco in the North End. A reporter, who either didn’t know or forgot that Montgomery is a recovering alcoholic asked if he’d tried Bricco’s espresso martini, “the best in the city.”
It could have been an incredibly awkward moment. But Montgomery let them off the hook.
“I asked if they have a virgin one because I’m a reformed alcoholic,” he said. “So, no, I didn’t get the full-powered one.”
He almost certainly never asked his server about the non-alcoholic version. Virgin espresso martinis are pretty uncommon and as a public figure, he certainly knows better than to even be seen holding something that looks like a drink.
But he improvised in an attempt to be kind, to keep from embarrassing someone, whose mistake could have embarrassed him.
Because of the playoff disappointments, Montgomery’s coaching acumen in Boston will forever be up for debate. But his class remains undisputed.
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