As far as homecomings go, it was about as much of an unceremonious one as it could be for Jim Montgomery returning to Boston for the first time.
He did have a number of people from the Winchester community, where he lived during his Boston Bruins tenure, make it out to TD Garden for Thursday night’s game, but they watched his St. Louis Blues get outclassed by his former B’s group in a 5-2 decision. The win for the Black and Gold pushed Boston all the way up to second in the Atlantic Division behind the Tampa Bay Lightning, and it also dropped the Blues to within a single point of the basement in the Central Division.
In a lot of ways, it felt like two teams going in extremely different directions, with the injury-ravaged Bruins still winning games even as they’re missing marquee players like David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy, and the Blues simply flailing with poor defense and a ton of sloppiness in the neutral zone where so much of today’s NHL game is won or lost.
It’s funny now to look back on Montgomery’s firing just about a year ago, as it set off a firestorm of criticism toward Don Sweeney and Cam Neely for canning three straight Jack Adams winners at the head coach position. While factually accurate, it was also a little disingenuous based on the way the firings went down.
Claude Julien, now an assistant coach on the St. Louis bench, was at the end of a long and glorious tenure in Boston when he was relieved of his duties. In other words, it was time for a chance. With Montgomery, it felt like he already had one foot out the door amidst the dismissal in the last year of his contract before almost immediately being rehired as the bench boss for the Blues.
Bruce Cassidy stands as the big miscue by Bruins management, looking back on hindsight, where they listened to a group of players that felt like he was too abrasive and too tough on them, and instead overcorrected with a softer, players' coach in Montgomery, whose teams display pretty consistent weak spots at each of his coaching stops.
It feels, at times, like there’s a little too much chaos on Montgomery’s benches, where too many men on the ice penalties became a regular occurrence, where never a discouraging public word was heard about players giving less than best effort, and where he was routinely outmaneuvered by opposing coaches in the playoffs. It doesn’t even begin to mention the major issues all of his teams seem to have in closing out close games when the other team pulls their goaltender, a chronic problem in Boston that has dogged the Blues since he took over in St. Louis as well.
To his credit, Monty didn’t hide away from any of these issues when talking to the media ahead of his return to Boston, but he didn’t exactly stand up and take ultimate accountability for it all either.
“Great memories — the disappointing memory too, of the first-round loss to Florida,” said Montgomery of his time in Boston ahead of Thursday night’s game. “But for me, it’s always about people, the great players, the management that I got the opportunity to work with. Everybody here made me better.”
"Any time teams fail, it's not just one person. It's impossible. Everybody had a hand in the great success we had my first season [in Boston] and everybody had a hand in why we failed last season. I would say the same thing [this year] in St. Louis. Last year [in Boston], the expectations were that we were going to be a playoff team. Didn’t work. So, everybody has these high expectations. [It’s] kind of like going to a movie. I remember going to see ‘The Usual Suspects.’ No one told me it was a great movie. I left there floored. I had to go watch it three more times to figure out who Keyser Soze was. But then I’ve gone to movies where people are like, ‘This movie is the best movie ever,’ and I leave halfway through. ‘Pulp Fiction,’ I left halfway through, because so many people said it was so great. It’s like 10 mini-stories in one movie. It’s not the way my brain works. But that’s what happens with sports teams, as well.”
"Lot of great memories... the great players, the management that I got the opportunity to work with, everybody here made me better in my opinion."
— St. Louis Blues (@StLouisBlues) December 4, 2025
Hear from Jim Montgomery ahead of his return to Boston Thursday night. #stlblues pic.twitter.com/WyZIDSy8Gp
None of this is to say that Montgomery isn’t a solid hockey coach or a genuinely good person away from the ice. He is an inspirational story to so many people given the personal challenges that he has overcome in his coaching career, and nobody can quibble with the great success that he enjoyed coaching in the college ranks.
But the hue and cry from some corners of Boston Bruins fandom that the Bruins had let the next