A year ago Jim Montgomery was openly discussing mistakes made and hard lessons learned by the B’s bench boss after being unceremoniously eliminated in the first round of the playoffs at the hands of the Florida Panthers.
Well, what a difference a year makes.
This time around it seems Montgomery is pushing all the right buttons and pulling all the proper levers to start a first-round playoff series against the Toronto Maple Leafs where Boston jumped out to a 5-1 victory in Game 1 at TD Garden on Saturday night. It all started with Montgomery and the Bruins coaching staff opting for Jeremy Swayman as their starter in net for Game 1 after there had been plenty of healthy speculation on whether it would be Swayman or Linus Ullmark starting between the pipes.
The intrigue was all cleared up during warmups with Swayman getting the call before going out and playing the part to perfection with 35 saves for the Game 1 victory that’s going to make it pretty easy to call his number again for Monday night’s Game 2. Swayman made double-digit saves in each of the three periods and was flawless in the first period while both the Leafs and Bruins were battling with high speed and tenacity.
And he was not taking any of it for granted while getting one of the biggest starting assignments of his pro hockey career.
“It was a great opportunity and I’m just happy it was a great result,” said Swayman. “This was a dream come true. It’s such a privilege to play in this league and for this city and taking that first lap while seeing the fans and all the towels is a pretty emotional feeling. You just understand how hard it is to get there and what a great opportunity it was, so you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face all night.”
The interesting philosophy behind Montgomery’s choice was to allow Swayman the chance to start a playoff series after Linus Ullmark had been the Game 1 starter in each of the previous two playoff series for the Bruins.
“We felt that Swayman hadn’t had the opportunity to start a playoff series in the last couple of years,” said Jim Montgomery. “We wanted to see him start a series to see how he would handle it. He did really well.
“It’s going to be hard to go away from Swayman [in Game 2]. He had a terrific game and we won 5-1. If we did decide to go with Ullmark then we’re comfortable with it and our team is comfortable with it. It doesn’t affect us in the [dressing] room no matter who is starting in net for us.”
There will, of course, be conversations about the uniqueness of the Bruins goalie situation, particularly if the playoff turns for the B’s goalies can become like a classic rotation where Ullmark and Swayman have thrived in the last couple of seasons. And there will be major curiosity about the “when’s” and “how’s” of deploying the two accomplished goaltenders as the Bruins attempt to manage an unconventional situation with no real roadmap on how to do it.
For Saturday night, it was simply about Montgomery making the perfect call for a Game 1 start for Swayman. Moving forward the B’s coach should be looking to avoid a situation like last season where they didn’t change things up early enough in net during the playoff series vs. Florida with losing consequences.
The other piece of inspired hockey genius ahead of the Bruins' first-round playoffs series was Montgomery pulling apart the struggling power play units for a different, more offensive solution. The B’s head coach dropped Brad Marchand and Charlie McAvoy down to the second PP unit so his captain could create scoring plays with normal linemates like Charlie Coyle and Jake DeBrusk.
And they elevated the creative Kevin Shattenkirk to run the point on the Bruins top power play unit with David Pastrnak, Pavel Zacha, Danton Heinen and Pat Maroon filling roles. Clearly adjustments were a big part of Montgomery’s decision-making process with Shattenkirk’s point shot as a potentially big PP weapon that wasn’t as readily used by McAvoy while running the PP unit.
“I feel like it’s fresh with the players and they are moving,” said Montgomery. “I like the way we’re converging. The pace of the power play looks fast and when the power play looks fast then the penalty kill has to make split-second decisions. Even the first couple of power plays that we didn’t score on, I thought there was traffic and convergence at the net leading to opportunities to score.”
But the tweaks to the power play units have essentially made both groups equally dangerous, productive and able to shoulder the responsibility during a Stanley Cup playoff run while also competing with each other in practices and games. That could be a very healthy thing for a Bruins PP that struggled in a 2-for-29 funk at the end of the regular season before Montgomery played around with the special teams’ groups in the season’s final days.
On Saturday night’s Game 1, it was Jake DeBrusk paying dividends after the PP changes while scoring a pair of power play goals in the second period to help Boston pull away from the hungry Maple Leafs. The first score was a simple curl at the top of the circle where DeBrusk fired a shot through a Morgan Geekie screen that Ilya Samsonov had zero shot of stopping inside the far post.
None of this is to say that Montgomery and the B’s coaching staff feel like they’ve figured everything out when it comes to advancing out of the first round. There will be changes made along the way in the playoffs for the B’s whether it’s managing a dual goaltending rotation game-to-game, fine-tuning special teams’ groups that could help give Boston a push or keeping the team perspective in mind.
And there will absolutely be adjustments by the Leafs after getting their tail feathers kicked on Saturday night.
That’s all part of the high stakes chess game called coaching during the Stanley Cup playoffs and, at times, outwitting your head coach counterpart on the other bench if the situation presents itself. Montgomery is off to a great start with a couple of big-time coaching decisions that have helped vault the Bruins to a 1-0 lead in the best-of-seven series as seemingly everybody attempts to change the narrative of last spring’s one-and-done playoff failure with so much on the line.