You knew it had to happen, but Jim Montgomery’s life as the Boston Bruins head coach didn’t take a turn for the worse in Monday night’s ghastly 5-1 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Nope. Monty was in trouble the moment a Brad Marchand breakaway didn’t bury the Florida Panthers back in Game 5 at TD Garden in May of 2022.

Marchand missed in the final seconds of regulation, robbed by Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky. The Panthers won in overtime, 4-3, to close to 3-2 in games and of course, all remember, went on to win the series with another overtime goal in Game 7.

That was a Bruins team that won a record 65 games. Gone, vanquished in the first round, making a farce of the Presidents Trophy for the best regular season team yet again.

The Bruins weren’t quite as good last year, but they did beat their version of a playoff patsy in the Toronto Maple Leafs in seven games, before falling to Florida in five. There was talk that Montgomery would’ve been canned if he went 0 for 2 in the playoffs.

But the chatter was so rampant all fall that the Montgomery was a dead coach walking. They lost to St. Louis in overtime on Saturday and Columbus on Monday, both at home. Montgomery had a beef with Marchand. He got on spoiled sniper David Pastrnak – Pasta had zero, zippo, zilch, nada shots on net Monday night vs. the horrible Blue Jackets, how does that happen — benching hm for a spell. Then he tossed under-performing goalie Jeremy Swayman under the bus. Swayman is the smartest guy in the room, just ask him. He was smart enough to hold out and get his $8.5 million a year contract when the Bruins should’ve told him have fun playing street hockey. That’s what Harry Sinden would’ve done.

Clearly, this was a case of canning the coach because they didn’t have a mega shakeup deal in the works. Those don’t happen often, like in the mid 1970s when the B’s traded Phil Esposito to the Rangers for Brad Park, Jean Ratelle and Joe Zanussi. Yikes, talk about dating oneself.

The Bruins are slow. Their power play stinks. The goaltending stinks. Marchand isn’t getting any younger. Major free agent signings center Elias Lindholm and defenseman Nikta Zadorov are El Bustos, giving the B’s nothing.

So now it’s up to Joe Sacco, who has been coaching as an assistant with the Bruins for just over a decade, hired back on July 24, 2014. Evidently the team is going to give him a chance to earn a contract and shed the interim label. And he’s coached close by, as he was once an assistant with the Lowell Lock Monsters, nearly 20 years ago (2005-06).

Can these things work? Well, consider this: In November of 2018, the St. Louis Blues fired head coach Mike Yeo with the team 7-9-3 and replaced him with Craig Berube. Berube immediately had the team playing a tough, physical style, went 30-10-5 th erest of the season.

And oh, yeah, and the Blues won Game 7 in the Stanley Cup Finals beating, um, the Bruins at TD Garden.

Take it away, Joe Sacco. Hopefully Marchand won’t miss the breakaway.

Tom King can be reached at tking@nashuatelegraph.com, or on X (formerly twitter) @Telegraph _TomK.