With little prodding, in fact without the least bit of prompting or cajoling, Jim Montgomery harkened back to his childhood in Montreal when asked Saturday morning about the challenge that awaited his Bruins in Game 7 of their playoff match with the Maple Leafs at TD Garden.
James “Jimmy” Montgomery was a stellar athlete, a boxer for Team Canada in the 1956 Olympics (Melbourne) who also excelled in football, rugby, and basketball. When he talked sports with his youngest son, Jim, the discussion was framed in honesty, often raw and painfully blunt, and not with huzzahs.
“I was lucky to be raised by a man who was really hard on me, who won three national championships in three different sports,” recalled Montgomery, 54, following his club’s morning workout on Causeway Street. “He understood team. He understood how you needed to embrace moments like this. I think I was raised to embrace moments like that and that’s why I have confidence on nights like tonight.”
Faced with the possibility of again being sent off to an early summer, the coach and the 20 skaters to wear Black and Gold also had to face the ugly reality that Games 5 and 6 of the seven-game series were among their worst all season. Yes, the scores were close (a pair of 2-1 Toronto victories), but the Bruins’ level of play was such that Montgomery’s dad would have turned the air blue inside of the family station wagon had he been behind the wheel on the drive home.
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“Game 5, that wasn’t us,” Montgomery noted in the last couple of days, “I didn’t recognize that team.”
Truth is, despite once holding a 3-1 series lead, the woes to creep into the Bruins’ game have been around for some time, for too long, pre-dating Montgomery’s two seasons on the job. They were here, too, under Bruce Cassidy’s successful tenure, which included a thrilling run to Game 7 in the 2019 Stanley Cup Final.
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The issue, above all, is presence … the art, the skill, the courage, the mental and physiological sinew, and never to be discounted, the pride required to take the game right to where it counts most, to the opposition’s net. It’s the area where winning teams thrive in the postseason and where losing teams usually fail.
Your faithful puck chronicler set up the series with a column that noted the Black and Gold’s recent failures in attaining “inside ice,” including a year earlier when the Bruins frittered away a 3-1 series lead en route to a Round 1 loss to Florida. The column was published online some 6-7 hours prior to Game 1 at the Garden, leading Montgomery casually to tell me, “Liked what you wrote. I hope our players read it,” as he walked by the Garden mess hall just prior to puck drop.
Look, the players get it. Everyone gets it, right? If an old man working a coffee-stained keyboard sprinkled with Tim Horton’s donut crumbs can figure it out, then it’s as obvious as that thick, bold red stripe that runs wall to wall across center ice.
Team president Cam Neely surely gets it, because he made his career, and many of his 395 goals, hauling tail to the front of the net and knocking down the array of stuffed sausages (weight range, 190-240 pounds) dumb enough to get in his way. To those who resisted a little too much, Neely used his hands a different way to score his point.
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General manager Don Sweeney knows it, too, and he also knows it’s a different game than the less-skilled, brunt-force era than when he and Neely made their living in game skates instead of dress shoes. Today’s NHL is all about speed and skill, pass and shoot, and everyone in the Original 32 pretty much plays the same go-kart hockey game over the course of 82 regular-season games.
Brute force ain’t really a thing, October-April, when those go-karts are trimmed with rubber bumpers and sweet music fills the air.
Ah, but then comes the 16-win challenge to win the Cup, and the whiz kids have trouble when it’s time to play heavy metal. That’s what we’ve seen here in the springs of 2020, ’21, ’22, ’23, and for much of ’24. An abundance of regular-season skill and success, followed by a dearth of playoff jam and an heaping helping of shoulder-shrugging failure.
Be it by the roster engineering of Neely and Sweeney, or through the consequences of injuries or freak goals or bad calls — the usual potpourri of playoff nightmares — the results have been decidedly meh.
Going into Game 7 against Toronto, the Bruins were 20-21 in their 41 playoff games since losing Game 7 of the Cup Final to the Blues in 2019. Were they to lose to the Leafs, for the first time since the 1959 playoffs, it would be their third consecutive Game 7 shooing.
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Bad luck typically balances out. But repeated, perennial failures to get to the net and score, to get the most important job done, that really speaks to player selection (drafting, trades, free agent hires) and player development. In short, too many guys coming up short.
Sure, some of that, a healthy portion, falls to the coaches (Cassidy, Montgomery and their faithful lieutenants). Their Job 1 is taking the talent, shaping it, then fitting a game plan and method around it, putting players in positions where they can thrive.
Ultimately, though, it all comes down to collective player talent and roster building, the charge and raison d’etre of Neely and Sweeney.
Neely and Sweeney lived the battle, playing a collective 201 playoff games. They delivered the goods necessary to get to the Cup Final in 2019. Neely, remember, also helped then-GM Peter Chiarelli shape the heavy, resilient squad that won in 2011 and made it to the Final again in ’13.
But if what we’re going to see now is another first- or second-round failure, the root of it once more a lack of skill and character and brains and moxie to get where the goals are scored, and then score them, then that is squarely on the corner office.
True, the players on hand will have come up short. They’ll shake their heads and regret how hard it was to get good looks and Grade A chances. But that would be five straight years of saying the very same thing. Different players. Different coaches. Same result.
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That leaves Neely and Sweeney facing the uncomfortable reality that either their approach changes or someone else hires the working help.
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com.