Jim Montgomery couldn't even get through his first answer of Tuesday's season-ending press conference.
Montgomery happened to sit at the microphone on the far right of the setup in the Legends club at TD Garden. That microphone provided ear-grating feedback that not even nails on a chalkboard could rival.
He tried again. It got worse.
"I don't think anyone wants me to answer the question," he joked.
Last week, the fire alarm went off at Warrior Ice Arena after Nick Foligno tried to answer if dealing with the Florida Panthers' forecheck was like a "fire drill." Then, the elevators wouldn't work at the practice facility, and Tuesday, technical difficulties precluded the start of the eulogy that was management's season-ending press conference.
It's just the way things have gone for the Boston Bruins lately.
With the audio restored and the press conference back underway, Montgomery got to his point.
The bench boss has shouldered his share of criticism for not turning to Jeremy Swayman in net sooner than he did in the Bruins' unceremonious first-round exit to the Cats. Linus Ullmark did not look right as the series wore on. Mental fatigue led to a gaffe for the ages in Game 5 when his turnover led directly to Matthew Tkachuk's overtime game-winner and physical fatigue reared its ugly head in Game 6, when Ullmark let up six goals for the first time all season in the first instance in which he started six games in a row.
"In hindsight, absolutely," Montgomery said as to whether or not he regretted putting Swayman in earlier. "The mistake I made is — I try to put our players in the best situation to excel. There is an added mental grind in the playoffs, and it takes a toll, right? That’s what I’ve learned through this grind is, the expectations that were put on our team going into the playoffs, there is a price you pay. Everybody does and I think we are going to learn from this, everybody. The players, especially me, I’m going to learn and I’m going to have to help the players push through, which I didn’t do this year."
As visible as it was that Ullmark wasn't himself, the goaltender was mum on his health last week during Boston's break-up day. Don Sweeney did not provide any clarity on Tuesday, saying Ullmark was healthy enough to play and pushing back on Kevin Weekes' report from last week that the netminder had a "debilitating" injury. Whatever caused Ullmark to leave the second-to-last game of the regular season against Washington was no longer an issue, according to Sweeney.
"I will clarify that we get a medical report every day as an organization and who is available to us," Sweeney said. "So, the statement of debilitating and painful injury might have been more pertinent to Patrice Bergeron when he was injured. Again, we get a report that is who is available, and Linus was fully available to play. He had something that was going on at the very, very end of the season, but it had cleared up for him to be eligible to play and had he not been, we certainly would have made a different decision. We felt very comfortable all year with the rotation we had and confidence in both goaltenders.”
After a shaky Game 2, Ullmark put forth strong showings in Games 3 and 4 in Florida, stopping a combined 70 of 74 shots. He stopped just 47 of 57 in Games 5 and 6. Swayman could have been in at any point of the series after Boston successfully rotated both goaltenders in the regular season. Instead, he was thrown to the wolves for Game 7, where although he didn't have his best night, the 24-year-old still gave his team a chance to win. Montgomery deferred to Bob Essensa after Game 7 on the decision-making but clarified himself on Tuesday before later adding it was a question of Ullmark's abilities, not his health.
"Well, first of all, all season long I said that Goalie Bob makes the decision – I make the final decision, right? I’m the one that picks the starter. So, it’s not Goalie Bob’s decision, but I really rely on him heavily," Montgomery said. "To answer the question specifically, we discussed this as a staff. I will talk in the playoffs especially, even more so with Sweens and Cam [Neely], and in the end, we win Games 3 and 4, so you have two days off and you think Game 5 is going to go well and I personally spoke with Linus, and he answered me a real honest question and took ownership of where he was at in Game 5. And what he relayed to me, made me believe that you learn and you grow, and he was ready to grow and lead us to a Game 6 win. That in the end is what made me decide that he was our goaltender for Game 6."
After pushing the right buttons for a record-setting 65 wins, plus an additional three in the postseason, the Bruins couldn't break through the same way they did during the regular season.
"You look at the season, and you lose sight of the accomplishment because of the failure," Sweeney said. "That’s what you’re ultimately going to be judged upon and that’s what we sign up for."
It has quickly become a painful learning experience for Montgomery, in the end.
"The overriding [teachable moment] is, it’s my job to get the players to own the moment, seize the moment, and that didn’t happen, right? And that falls on me," Montgomery said. "I think with the hard times we went through, we have to learn from them. If we don’t learn from them, how are we going to grow? We will just repeat the same thing next year. So, for me, it’s being able to connect with the players over the course of the summer and build through training camp about what we have to do to make sure that we don’t have the same energy level. Because we didn’t have the same energy level we had in the regular season, we didn’t have the same puck confidence that we had in the regular season, and it hurts. Right now... I’ve talked to players, and it’s hard right now, it’s hard for our fans, it’s hard for us. The price we pay is we have to learn from it so that we move forward."
Second-guessing has abounded, whether it be the straying away from the goaltending tandem altogether, when Swayman should have gone in, puzzling lineup decisions and so on. A few stand out to Montgomery, in particular.
"I mean, hindsight, you can go back and look at everything, right?" he said. "But the two things that come to mind would’ve been, what I’ve learned. I’ve already talked about the toll on the goaltenders and going to Sway a little earlier, what game that is, that’s debatable — again, that’s hindsight. Not starting with my normal lines for Game 5, I have my logic as to why it made sense, but it didn’t help us with our start, obviously, right? So, that I learned from. You know, I think I could have switched the D-pairings on who the matchups were a little bit quicker. We were shutting down one line really well, we weren’t shutting down another line really well, we did for two games, and we didn’t for five.
"Those are the things that really stick with me, but the number one thing is my job is to get the players to elevate their games and I didn’t do that.”
Montgomery trotted Bergeron out with Tyler Bertuzzi and David Pastrnak for Game 5. Bergeron wasn't himself, eventually revealing he played with a herniated disc in his back. Splitting No. 37 and Brad Marchand, then adding the former with two players with inefficiencies at 5-on-5 quickly became a regrettable move. Marchand and Jake DeBrusk's stronger 5-on-5 games would have aided the ailing Bergeron, and DeBrusk's footspeed would have been hugely beneficial.
The Bruins had no reservations about playing their injured captain, though.
Montgomery said. "After Game 3, I called Patrice. We were in Florida, and I was talking to him, and I said, ‘I know you’re doing better, I’ve seen the video of your rehab skates. If we win Game 4, is it prudent for us to give you more time?’ And he goes, ‘What do you mean?’ I go, ‘Do we not play you Game 5?’ And he said, ‘Monty, I’m playing Game 5.’ That was enough for me to know. You don’t keep Hall of Fame players out of the lineup."
Bertuzzi-Bergeron-Pastrnak played just 1:49 together as a line at 5-on-5. There was a Bertuzzi turnover that directly resulted in Florida's first goal of Game 5. Montgomery quickly pivoted from the trio. In Game 7, he went with Marchand-Bergeron-Bertuzzi instead of the typical and obvious Marchand-Bergeron-DeBrusk first line. While Marchand-Bergeron-Bertuzzi had a hold on attempts (15-9) and shots (6-5) in 13:54 of 5-on-5 play, scoring chances favored Florida, 4-1. The Cats outscored Boston 1-0 with that unit on the ice.
There was mishandling of the defensive core. Connor Clifton's insertion into the lineup in place of Matt Grzlecyk has been well-documented. The former's gaffes directly led to three goals for the Panthers, whether by way of turnovers or being out of position. In Game 7, Montgomery kept Dmitry Orlov and Charlie McAvoy together. Orlov-McAvoy had mixed returns together in the regular season, which continued into the postseason, where Florida outscored Boston 5-3, had a near 55 percent hold of scoring chances and a near 60 percent edge in high-danger looks in all situations with the pair on the ice. The Grzlecyk-McAvoy pair had a proven track record, while a decent Orlov-Clifton pair, which had a plus-22 scoring chance differential and a plus-eight edge in high-danger looks with Orlov-Clifton on the ice for 77:23 of 5-on-5 play in the regular season, was there for the taking.
While the defense matched up well with the Aleksander Barkov line, keeping the Panthers' captain in particular to just one goal in the series, the second-line duo of Tkachuk and Sam Bennett wreaked havoc on Boston. The Bruins failed to come up with any sort of answer for them, and the two were front and center on the goal that ended the B's season.
"Give credit, Florida's forecheck is giving Toronto trouble. It gave us a struggle," Sweeney said. "They played that way for probably the last two and a half, three months of the season. So, we knew what was coming. And it's another thing to handle. The moment you go back and look at every player and their situation, they either get the job done or don't. In some cases, we didn't. And puck management was an issue, generally mostly an issue for us in the neutral zone. More so the defensive zone because we were a transitional, a really good team. We weren't going to be reliant on the rush. You know, we felt we could play in a different style. We just failed to execute in some of those key, key moments. And the margins are small. That's just how playoff hockey goes."
Even if Montgomery is falling on the sword for the lack of execution and disintegration of the structure and layers that treated Boston so well for 82 games, Sweeney isn't pointing the finger at one person, instead looking at the collective breakdown.
"Obviously, Jim and I communicate every day. So, you know, in recapping the events, you know, in the playoffs, we went through a litany of things in areas that we would maybe look at a little differently and try to improve as we go forward and put players in different situations," Sweeney said. "So, we have to have those difficult discussions. It's not about just pointing the finger at any one person. At the end of the day, you know, ill time for execution was a massive problem for us. In particular, in some of the games, you know, breakdown in structure, which we really hadn't done for the vast majority of the season. And our goaltending wasn't at the same level of the regular season. So those three things combined are going to lead to variance in results.
"Now you can pinpoint and start to point fingers, but that's not what this organization is about. You take that collective failure, and you have to acknowledge the areas that you're going to improve. And Jim's referencing some of those things, and so am I. So behind closed doors, we are going to call each other out in those areas and pinpoint. It's not any one singular person's fault. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody in the course of the game."
The Bruins had three games to close out Florida and move on to the second round. They had two third-period leads in Game 6 before losing, 7-5. They had a 3-2 lead with a minute to go in Game 7 before losing in overtime, 4-3. For a team that had proved time and time again in the regular season that the third period was its best, the confidence completely evaporated. Sweeney felt Game 6 served as a summation of it all.
"It was not a team that I was comfortable watching in the course of the night," he said. "You know, even at 4-3, I might have taken a breath because I felt that in third periods when we grasp the momentum in games, you know, we were able to lock it down, and we kind of came apart in those situations. We have leads at 4-3 and 5-4. You know, a vast majority of the season, you were watching a team that was in command. Even in Game 7... we're in control of the game at 3-2. That's the team that we had expected to continue to play and move through the playoffs because that's what we had done repeatedly with players injured during the course of the season, with a full component of the lineup, trust in our depth, trust in our decision-making to play any player in situations, getting the right players on the ice. Again, I go back to the fact we had ill-timed execution, breakdowns in structure, and again the goaltending, which was fantastic for the regular season, was average, as was some of our play."
The Bruins may never have as deep of a roster or as strong of an opportunity to win as they did this season. Montgomery may not have the same plethora of lineup combinations. As has been mentioned previously, if you said at the start of the year that Boston would be a tough first-round out, it would have felt like an accurate assessment. But expectations quickly piled up, and talk of the records and Presidents' Trophy curse grew louder. Neely thinks it's part of what cracked the Bruins' strong bedrock.
"If you recall going into last season, everybody had us as a potential wild card team. So, there were zero expectations going into this past season. Especially with all the injuries, we had to start the year. I think with the change we made with the head coach, everybody was questioning where we were going," he said. "So, we end up having this historic year, my concern was, 'O.K., are the guys going to put too much pressure on themselves because of the regular season we had, and the expectation just went through the roof?
"I had a couple players at the exit meetings actually apologize, say, ‘You guys gave us a wagon of a team, and we didn’t execute.’ So, the players, they know. Players know when you have a chance to win and when you don’t. They knew we had a chance to win. They knew we had a chance to go deep. And for whatever reason, we didn’t play the way we played in the regular season. ... The confidence, the nerves, I don’t know what it was, but these are the things that we have to dig into. Narratives started to change. You win the President's Trophy, teams rarely win the Stanley Cup. So, all those things, the outside noise, maybe crept in a little bit, for me.”
As he had midway through the series, Montgomery again said the playoffs are "a different animal." The Bruins failed to match Florida's intensity, and as he said, the confidence that Boston had in the regular season just wasn't there when the pressure ramped up.
He believes there's more they could have done to help prepare his team to be able to respond to getting socked in the mouth after a regular season that saw them mow through the rest of the league.
"You know, peer meetings where we would set players up in groups and they could communicate to one another because the hard truths are the hard truths, and your peers know where you need to be a little bit more prudent in your game or in your off-ice habits, whatever the case may be," he suggested. "I think that kind of inner conflict would, I believe, help our players prepare a little bit better for the hard times ahead because the playoffs are a different animal.
"We're seeing that even in the second round. I talked to Jon Cooper yesterday. He's like, ‘The first round is the wild, wild West. You just have to get through.’ And we didn't get through. And those are hard times that fall on us right now because of that. So that inner conflict, I believe, helps you mentally prepare. And that's one thing I would change."
But in the nine days that have passed since the stunning slow-motion collapse that was their first-round series, the Bruins are left grappling with the do-overs and regrets that they wish they could change.
"I can’t sit here and B.S. anybody, this stung. This stung, this left an empty feeling," Neely said, marking it as a "close second" to losing Game 7 of the 2019 Stanley Cup Final at home. "There was a lot left on the table this year, for sure."
Charlie Jacobs said, "I at times have a hard time finding words for just how empty I feel – knowing all that was put into this season, all the potential we had for this run, and it’s incredibly disappointing."
Montgomery isn't shying away from his shortcomings, whether it be lineup decisions or better preparation for the pressure. He summed up his feelings in three quick words.
"Frustrated, mad, accountable."
