BOSTON — The Boston Bruins’ struggles to perform under Jim Montgomery led general manager Don Sweeney to fire the head coach 20 games into this season.
Now star players and leaders Brad Marchand, David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy have to step up and help interim head coach Joe Sacco turn the season around.
“I think it really started a lot of reflection in here for this group,” McAvoy said of the coaching change after practice on Wednesday. “And a lot of looking in the mirror at the things that we’ve done to this point, myself, the team, everybody to get to this point and, acknowledging how it hasn’t been our standards and about trying to find the way to get it back.”
Even with the slow start and inconsistent play on the ice, McAvoy admitted he didn’t necessarily see the change coming.
“It was more so the feeling of like, you know, something’s going to give, we have to find a way to get this back, acknowledging that there’s so much time left in this season, you know, for us to get it back,” he said. “But mainly acknowledging, looking in the mirror and understanding to a man what we’ve done to this point to get here, and how we’re going to work our way out of it because that’s the only thing we can do at this point is to show up every single day and work our way out of this.“
How does McAvoy envision the Bruins getting back to their standard of being a team that’s hard to play against? Simple, by working hard.
“That’s part of our overlying theme here that we’re going to rediscover moving forward is just, it’s all about working,” McAvoy said. “We can control our work ethic. We can control our pace every single day. You know, whether you got the legs or not, you control how hard you work, and that was something that we need to get back to, that we will get back to, controlling our compete level and being that Bruins team that no one wants to play.
“… I’m just focused about where we are now and how we turn this leaf over individually and collectively the things that we’re going to do moving forward starting with our work ethic and getting back to our standards of what it means to be a Bruin.”
As for how the Bruins lost their mojo this season, that’s a question McAvoy couldn’t answer.
“At this point, I couldn’t point my finger on it. You want to go back to camp or the beginning of the season or, whatever it was, we lost it,” McAvoy said. “We lost it for a minute, and this is life, and these things happen. But today you wake up, and you realize that you still have the best job in the world, playing for the best team in the world, the best organization in this game. I’m lucky, and I’m blessed to be here, and today was a day of gratification, self-reflection and then realizing that we have 62 games left, and we’re still in a playoff spot or somewhere near it. So we got everything to play for, and that’s the crest, that’s each other, that’s everything, and it’s all going to be alright.”
