Why coach Jim Montgomery’s positive mojo has worked with the Bruins - The Boston Globe
Montgomery's had nary a discouraging word to say, but his Bruins own the league’s best record and went into Saturday as the only NHL club yet to suffer back-to-back losses.
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For much of the 20th century, General Motors proudly stamped the “Body by Fisher” logo on the cars it rolled off the Detroit assembly line. GM and Fisher wanted buyers to know they partnered to provide them with a quality, stylish set of wheels.
If the Bruins, an astounding 38-6-4 entering weekend play, stamped a logo on their 2022-23 model, it would read, “Mojo by Montgomery.”
The ride with the ever-positive Jim Montgomery behind the bench just keeps getting better.
“I’m amazed when I look at our record,” Montgomery said during a quiet moment during his club’s stop at Montreal’s Bell Centre the other day. “It just seems like every time we’re in a game, it’s in my head, ‘We’re gonna find a way.‘ And then it happens. It’s almost like it’s magical.”
Hired by the Bruins at sizable risk over the summer to replace the popular and successful Bruce Cassidy, Montgomery has been a 5-foot-10-inch dynamo of optimism since Day 1 on the job. He’ll be the boss behind the Atlantic Division bench for the NHL All Star Game on Saturday, staged fittingly in Sunrise, the town in Southern Florida named in the spirit of hope and light that every new day brings.
It took the darkest day in Montgomery’s career, his destructive crash into alcoholism that brought his abrupt firing as the Dallas Stars coach in December 2019, to help him bring out what he now calls “the attitude of gratitude” that guides his thinking and defines his work.
In the end, he figures, it was that ugly crash and burn, coupled with his stint in rehab, that brought out his power of positivity.
“If you don’t learn why you’re not getting to the next level . . . ,” he said, noting how he has shaped and folded his own lessons learned into his coaching methods, “I mean, I had a horrific crash, right? An embarrassing one, anyway. But there’s been other moments when I’ve grown from lessons I’ve learned in life, because if you’re not continually trying to get better, then it’s usually ego, ego. Ego stops you from learning.”
We have yet to see how that Mojo by Montgomery will play when (if?) the Bruins hit a rough patch. Thus far, he’s had nary a discouraging word to say, but his Bruins own the league’s best record and they went into Saturday night’s matchup against the Panthers as the only NHL club this season yet to suffer back-to-back losses. Nothing much bad to say after 48 games and only a half-dozen regulation losses across four months.
No Bruins coach has been this successful off the hop. Likewise, none of his predecessors ever was so steadfastly positive, encouraging, or openly creative.
The 53-year-old Montgomery would be telling that 20-something Montgomery to forget the mistakes, move on quickly, seize the opportunity of the next shift — the mantra is central to his coaching now.
“I often think I’d be a much better hockey player,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind. Because I think it would have opened my mind just to being more positive as a player. My own biggest problem as a player was, when I screwed up, I lived with those things too long, and stewed on those things, and had no one telling me, ‘Just let it go.’ And [in that era], you were talked to about your mistakes and not about your positive assets.”
“They’ve encouraged all of us,” said Matt Grzelcyk, who scored in back-to-back games, Jan. 14 and 16. “Obviously, you don’t want to be too reckless, but I feel we all know the game pretty well.”
“Once it clicks a couple of times, the game kind of slows down a little bit,” Grzelcyk said. “I feel it helps both ways, too. When you feel better offensively with the puck, all of a sudden you are skating a little bit better, you’re more confident. Everyone likes to make plays, right? You don’t want just to play defense 24/7, so I think it helps to spend more time in the O-zone. It excites you a little bit more.”
In one-on-one video coaching sessions to review his play, said Grzelcyk, Montgomery is “serious, a light guy, but also serious, and really, really smart hockey-wise, we all know that.”
“More than anything, it’s encouraging,” added Grzelcyk when asked about the Montgomery method. “He’s, you know, ‘Trust yourself a little bit, because we have trust in you.’ I mean, that’s all you want to hear as a player.”
In-game, noted Montgomery, his attitude behind the bench is to remind players what they can do, not what they can’t do.
“I think it puts players in a better frame of mind to go out and make plays,” he said. “And in the end, the team that makes more plays — everyone’s going to make mistakes — but the team that makes more plays is going to win hockey games.”
