Don't Blame Jim Montgomery for Don Sweeney's Failures With the Bruins

The scene on the ice was loud, formal, and intense at Warrior Ice Arena on Wednesday, as the Bruins practiced for the first time since firing coach Jim Montgomery 24 hours prior. Had you stumbled in there with no concept of space or time, you might've thought it was a preseason training camp session.

If you've watched the 2024-25 Bruins (8-9-3, -21 goal differential) at all—especially their last few "efforts"—you'll understand why Training Camp II needed to happen 20 games into the season. The Bruins look lost and humbled, which is a rare form for a franchise that typically has an answer for anything.

There was a reflective emphasis on a training camp gone awry in the Bruins' locker room, and no one harped on it more than GM Don Sweeney. The blame was spread all across the locker room: from Jeremy Swayman, who missed camp because of contract negotiations, Brad Marchand, who missed a few weeks because of surgery recovery, and David Pastrnak, who apparently just didn't have a great camp. Above all, Sweeney said the training camp vibe was off.

It's translated to their play on the ice.

They've drastically reduced their shot volume; Pastrnak had zero in a 5-1 loss to the Blue Jackets Monday, and the whole team had zero in a period against Linus Ullmark's Senators recently. They're making silly mistakes that result in silly penalties, and not-so-silly goals against.

Oh, and the goalie that just signed an eight-year contract that was supposed to be your franchise netminder, Swayman? He's well below his career average, with a 3.47 goals against average and a .884 save percentage. The contentious negotiations in the preseason have a bad look all the way around.

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In the end, in captain Brad Marchand's words: "Someone had to take the fall." That person was Montgomery, despite having a 120-41-23 record, a Jack Adams Award, a Presidents' Trophy as Bruins coach, and a .715 winning percentage.

"I honestly couldn't point my finger on it," Charlie McAvoy said when asked why the standard had strayed. "You want to go back to camp, or the beginning of the season. Whatever it was, we lost it. We lost it for a minute."

"I just felt our camp was just flatline across the board. To me, that was the first troubling sign. We were flat all the way through training camp," Sweeney said. "Whether or not they thought it was going to be easy, and the guys that had a really good last year come out and that it would just fall in place, this league is incredibly humbling if you have that approach to the game. And it'll expose you in a hurry. That's sort of what's happened to our group in that it doesn't come easy and you have to work harder as a result of it."

Sweeney made it a point to mention the failures of training camp at least three times in his nearly 25-minute conversation with the media today, and I believe him. I'm sure training camp was terrible, as does having eyeballs when the Bruins are taking zero shots per period.

It's just—isn't that a him problem?

"I'm always on notice," Sweeney said when asked if Bruins owner Charlie Jacobs had slapped him on the wrist at any point in his nine-year tenure as GM.

Sweeney has been rightfully criticized for a lot already. Whether it's been the poor return from Nikita Zadorov and Elias Lindholm as big-money free-agent signings or his poor record of drafting—Bruins fans would like to forget the fact Boston had three first-round picks in 2015 and somehow missed out on Mathew Barzal, Kyle Connor and Thomas Chabot—the former Bruins defenseman has been catching heat for questionable decisions.

I'm more lenient on Sweeney's role in the 2015 catastrophe than most—he'd just replaced Peter Chiarelli, who'd made comically terrible decisions the Bruins decided to record and promote.

The problem is that Sweeney never really inspired confidence in the Bruins' drafting ever since. Sure, there have been successes—McAvoy and Swayman immediately come to mind—but the lack of impact players, especially at center, has come back to haunt them.

It worked on the surface, trading future assets for the here and now, given that Patrice Bergeron, Zdeno Chara, and David Krejci were the backbone of a core that won a Cup in 2010. But those great players are now retired and Sweeney's roster planning has left the Bruins in a complete mess.

At a certain point, you have to direct your attention to the one constant throughout this run. Sweeney has had three coaches: Claude Julien, Bruce Cassidy and Montgomery. All have been successful with the core built before Sweeney got there. They're gone. So's the core.

Maybe Cam Neely, Sweeney, and Co. thought they were immune to ever needing to sell the Bruins as a concept. I just don't understand how they didn't manage to home-grow a center through years of Bergeron and Krejci on generous deals, as the two centers were cheap and transparent about retirement plans.

Perhaps we had too much faith in thinking Sweeney would figure out an internal replacement for Bergeron and Krejci. Then again, he also had a track record of a decade trading for veterans like Rick Nash and Taylor Hall that brought little impact.

All that's left is Sweeney.

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The best training camps come from healthy competition with young players from the farm system desperately seeking to make the team. But this was going to be mostly the same roster with Zadorov and Lindholm, without a traded Ullmark and in limbo because of Swayman's contract holdout. The vibes, as the kids say, were off.

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The notion that the Bruins would always figure it out stemmed from the longstanding atmosphere built by the likes of Chara, Bergeron and Krejci.

It worked like this for over a decade!

That's a gigantic success for any franchise, and it allowed the Bruins a luxury most don't get, a luxury they completely wasted—to figure out the next iteration of the center core while we're still here. Wasn't that supposed to be part of the deal? I'd love to hear Bergeron's take on the matter. Like Sidney Crosby, he's had more influence and impact—direct or indirect—on players signing with the Bruins than any general manager.

Now that Bergeron's gone, Sweeney has nothing to show for it other than firing the "player-friendly" Jim Montgomery for the "straightforward" Joe Sacco. And hey, doesn't that straightforward Joe Sacco look a bit like that straightforward Cassidy?

Cassidy, who Sweeney fired, is doing just fine in Vegas. Sacco would know—he spent a long time coaching under Cassidy. Montgomery gets to keep an historic, 65-win season with the Bruins as a memory. Cassidy gets to keep redemption via a Golden Knights Stanley Cup as a memory.

Sweeney's legacy with the Bruins has been long, sordid, and Cupless. In firing Montgomery, he's running out of excuses. "Training camp" isn't a great start.