Bruins notebook: Team leaders face the music after Montgomery’s firing

Jim Montgomery’s firing is a clear reflection on the Bruin players. They know it and, on Wednesday, they performed the appropriate self-flagellation.

But it’s now on them to turn this thing around. There is time to do that, 62 games, and with only a couple of teams really distinguishing themselves, all it could take is a three-game win streak to get right back in the thick of it.

Through 20 games, however, the B’s have not yet managed to win three in a row. Captain Brad Marchand, saying they “let a really good coach and a really good person down,” stressed after Monday’s 5-1 loss and again on Wednesday that it’s going to be a long process for the B’s to get back to their old standard.

While Marchand’s play has been up and down, his voice in the room has been steady whenever he’s been called upon to deliver post-mortems after bad losses.

When he was asked how they get back to making the Bruins a “hard out” again, as GM Don Sweeney expressed, Marchand delivered a pretty good soliloquy on the state of the team and where it needs to go from here.

The road will not be an easy one.

“It’s completely a mindset. It’s very hard to play that way every night and to practice that way every day and prepare that way. And there’s a reason why there’s only a few teams in the league that can consistently have success, because you need to live and breathe it every day, year after year,” said Marchand. “Sometimes you get a little ahead of yourself, that you think you do something for a very short period of time that you deserve to be rewarded with success, rewarded with something. And that’s not the way it works. You need to do it consistently for a very long period of time. And it may not be this year. It may be that we do the right things day after day all of this year and all of next year to see the return on it, or the year after that, whatever it is. But eventually when you do the things year after year and day after day consistently, it will pay off at some point.

“But it’s the mindset that you have to live it and breathe it every day and it’s difficult to do that. It takes a lot of discipline. A lot of guys aren’t used to that. Most people in general aren’t used to that, to hold yourself to an incredibly high standard, look at yourself in the mirror and say it’s not good enough, even when you had a good game. Where can you improve? And you need to have a competitive edge and level that you’re willing to go to that other guys aren’t. And we haven’t done that enough. We did have that for a very long period of time but it took a lot of really good leaders and competitive guys to come in here and say they wanted to be difference makers and build something special. We have the group to do that. We have the group that has the ability. There’s a lot of guys who’ve been under-performing this year, myself included. If we get back to playing to our standard, we will be fine. No one’s looking at this and saying the season’s over and we can’t turn this thing around. It’s just that we have to be better. We know that and we have the ability to do that.”

When a team has fallen off as much as this one has, the leadership comes into question. GM Don Sweeney mentioned that he had to have a chat with Marchand himself about taking a bad penalty against Calgary that allowed the Flames to get back in the game (Marchand eventually won it himself in overtime).

Marchand acknowledged that he and his fellow letter-wearers David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy need to set the tone.

“We haven’t done a good enough job providing the example and holding (players) accountable that we need to and that we have in the past,” said Marchand.

Pastrnak enjoyed his two most productive seasons under Montgomery, but he’d drawn the coach’s ire earlier this year for a bad turnover. Montgomery benched him for the entire third period.

“For us as players, it’s a tough day. You obviously feel a part of guilt. Monty is a heck of a coach. He taught me and the others a heck of a lot,” said Pastrnak. “It’s obviously a tough day. You feel a big part of the guilt because at the end of the day us players are the ones performing out there. Because we weren’t getting the job done we lost a great coach and an amazing human being.”

McAvoy struck an optimistic tone.

“I think we have everything we need in this room. I haven’t wavered in that belief at all,” said McAvoy. “You just have to get back to the simplest things, the foundation of what we are. Working and competing. That’s it. There’s too much skill, there’s too much talent in this room where that won’t click and come together at some point. But you can’t see the skill, you can’t see the plays if we’re not working, if we’re not being the best that we can be at our ground level.”

Loose pucks

Sweeney said that he had made a contract offer to Montgomery before the season but a deal didn’t get done. Having a coach in the last year of a contract is not optimal but Sweeney had not regrets on that front.

“There’s no second-guessing. I was in extension talks and there were contract offers,” he said. “There’s two sides to every negotiation and they have to make those decisions accordingly. We have to read and react as a result of that. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t come to fruition at some point in time. It’s not like we shut things down. But at the end of the day, performance is part of this.”… Sweeney said that he’ll possibly bring in another assistant coach now that the staff is down a man. … Jeff Viel was brought up from Providence on Monday to inject some life into the lineup. He did what was asked of him but, unfortunately for him, no one else did. Viel was sent back to Providence after practicing with the team on Wednesday.