Jim Montgomery Will Finally Get His Say On Assistant Coaches

ST. LOUIS — Jim Montgomery has had three stops as a head coach in the NHL and there’s been one common theme to all three.

In each stop, including those with the Dallas Stars, Boston Bruins and now St. Louis Blues, assistant coaches were not selected by Montgomery himself, including some of the names that were in those stops included Rick Bowness, John Stevens, Jeff Reese and Stu Barnes in Dallas, and Joe Sacco, Chris Kelly, Jay Leach and Bob Essensa.

And when he was hired by the Blues on Nov. 24, 2024, Steve Ott, Claude Julien, Mike Weber and David Alexander were in place.

Ott has since been moved to be the head coach of Springfield of the American Hockey League, and with the Blues not renewing the contracts of Julien and Weber, Montgomery will will get a chance to finally give his input on the kind of coaches he would like to work with. Alexander has worked out well as the Blues’ goalie coach and will remain.

“I think the plan right now is to hire three,” Montgomery said last Saturday at the exit meetings inside Enterprise Center. “It might just be two. It really depends on the makeup of the people that we’re able to bring into the fold. There’s certain people that have the capability of doing more than one task. That might mean we can so less than three coaches, but that all will depend on who we’re able to talk to and who’s available.”

It’s been said that Montgomery is really fond of Stevens, but the father of former Blues fifth-round pick in the 2016 NHL Draft Nolan Stevens, is currently an assistant with the Vegas Golden Knights and has been there the past four seasons.

An ideal candidate would be David Carle, who was Montgomery’s assistant coach when he was the head coach at the University of Denver, but there’s no chance Carle, who replaced Montgomery when he was hired in Dallas in 2018, is leaving Denver for the NHL unless it was for a head coaching position, and he’s turned down multiple opportunities to do that.

So instead of guessing who Montgomery might have his eye on, he was asked what kind of coach he’s interested in. After all, the Blues have finished in the bottom third of both ends of the special teams in each of the past three seasons.

“I think that with hiring a couple of assistant coaches, there’s going to be a blend of what we need,” Montgomery said. “For sure we need someone that’s really good at PK, we need someone that has a history of doing well on the PP. Our special teams the last two years were not good enough. You’ve got to be at 100 (percent) combined PK, PP. It’s not the assistant coaches that are no longer (their) fault. It’s the players, myself and everyone’s plan together. That’s the way we look at it. It’s a “we” thing. That has to be significantly better, so that’s going to be really important.

“We’re going to need someone that has high energy, we’re going to need someone that’s a cerebral thinker, but the most important thing is that they’re intelligent and they teach, they know how to teach. You know how to teach defensemen how to pivot the right way, stick on puck. You look at Florida’s teams the last two years, they have a stick on every puck. How do we get someone to implement that? And that’s what I’m going to be looking for is some specialties in coaches that are going to be able to come in and make our players individually better and understand the team concept in those things that they do and why it’s important to get them to habitually do it.”

Montgomery will sit down with general manager Doug Armstrong and incoming GM Alexander Steen and compile the best names available and work from there, according to Armstrong.

“My exercise in what I do, I put all the attributes on one side and I put all the names on the top and I just go down and whoever’s got the most check marks, we hire,” Armstrong said. “What I want to do is I want to sit and I want to take what I believe is a good staff and then I want to sit with Alex and get his beliefs, and ‘Monty’ and then marinate that together and then we put the names up and then we go to work. ‘Monty’s obviously going to have a ton of say in these hires, but it has to be vetted, and my decisions, my thought process, I need them to vet and I hope they respect me vetting theirs and we’ll come up with the criteria that’s needed before the names.

“What I don’t want to do is just start throwing out names. I want to find out what we want and then what names fit that more than just putting a guy in here just because he’s got a name and hope it works out.”

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