Bruins Praise Jim Montgomery’s ‘Fantastic’ Game 1 Recognition

It’s pretty clear Jim Montgomery has a good sense of where his Bruins team is at right now.

The Boston head coach is pushing all the right buttons at the moment, as evidenced in Monday night’s 5-1 win over the Florida Panthers in Game 1 of their second-round Stanley Cup playoffs series. The game wasn’t nearly as close as the final score might have indicated, and even with the Bruins holding a two-goal lead early in the third period, Montgomery didn’t like what he saw.

So, 5:48 into the final frame, Montgomery burned his timeout. He gathered his team at the bench and tried to refocus his group. It worked. Justin Brazeau pushed the lead to three with his first career playoff goal less than two minutes later, and the Bruins choked out Florida from there.

“I just wanted us to relax, be calm, have poise and execute,” Montgomery explained in his postgame press conference. “I could tell players were hurried, a little frantic with the puck. … I just thought it would be a good time to reset.”

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Bruins defenseman Brandon Carlo credited his coach for making the most of a teaching opportunity.

“I think he did a fantastic job recognizing how the momentum was going. There are going to be a lot of those pushes. They’re a great team — offensively, defensively — they’re going to make plays,” Carlo said in a postgame press conference. “I think, at the right time, he made that timeout and told us to just stay composed, calm down a little bit. That was huge for us.”

Bruins goalie Jeremy Swayman wasn’t at the bench to hear Montgomery’s message, but he didn’t need to be involved to know his coach’s intuition was right.

“He knows the game so well,” Swayman told reporters after Game 1. “He knows when to have our bench, take a timeout. He has such a great sense of game management. I think after the timeout, you could tell the momentum was shifting, and I had no doubt in my mind our guys were going to respond the right way.”

The well-placed timeout came on the heels of Montgomery deciding to have the team stay in a hotel ahead of Game 7 at home with morning skate at TD Garden and not Warrior Ice Arena. When you have that sort of read on your group, it’s probably a lot easier to get buy-in.

“He believes in us a lot,” Carlo added. “At times, it’s just about hearing it and believing in ourselves and going out there and doing it.”