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Quick Hits: May 26, 2022
1) WHL Playoffs: The Winnipeg Ice find themselves in a three games to one hole in the Western Hockey League's Eastern Conference Final series with the Edmonton Oil Kings. On Wednesday, Edmonton captured a 4-2 victory in Game 4 of the series. In a losing cause, Flyers draftee Connor McClennon assisted on a pair of goals -- one on the power play at one at even strength -- scored by Winnipeg's Owen Pederson. Winnipeg never led in Game 4, trailing 2-1 at the first intermission and 3-2 after two periods. Winnipeg center Matthew Savoie, a potential top 10 selection in the upcoming 2022 NHL Entry Draft, has missed the last two games due to an injury suffered in the second period of Game 2.
2) With the St. Louis Blues extended their Western Conference Semifinal series with the Colorado Avalanche to a Game 6 at the Enterprise Center on Friday night, the Flyers will have to wait a little longer if they (as rumored) intend to ask the Blues organization for permission to interview Blues assistant coach Jim Montgomery about Philadelphia's head coaching vacancy.
A Flyers role player in the mid-1990s who shuttled between the NHL club's fourth line and the organization's AHL farm club (first the Hershey Bears and later the Philadelphia Phantoms), Montgomery's Flyers stint is best remembered for two things: 1) He dubbed the line of John LeClair, Eric Lindros and Mikael Renberg as "the Legion of Doom", a reference to the persona of the pro wrestling tag team called the Road Warriors or the Legion of Doom , which would dominate and intimidate opponents with their size and muscle; 2) In a losing effort, Montgomery scored the first goal of Game 6 of the 1995 Eastern Conference Final against the eventual Stanley Cup champion New Jersey Devils.
As a member of the Phantoms, Montgomery was a key veteran player for Bill Barber's Calder Cup championship winning team in 1997-98. He posted 62 points in 68 regular season games and then dialed up his play in the Calder Cup playoffs to compile 29 points (13g, 16a) in 20 games during the run to the championship. He remained a Phantoms' mainstay for several more seasons.
A University of Maine product who broke into the NHL with the Blues, Montgomery played until 2005. After leaving the Flyers' organization during the 1999-2000 season, he interspersed additional short NHL spells with the San Jose Sharks and Dallas Stars as a fourth liner with lengthier time spent as a multi-situation player for their AHL affiliates. Montgomery also spent some time in Europe, playing in Germany's DEL and the Russian Super League (the predecessor circuit to the KHL).
As a player, Montgomery was known as something of a free spirit with a good sense of humor. Some former teammates were surprised when he made a transition from playing to coaching, not really seeing "Monty" as the "coaching type." Instead, coaching turned out to be Montgomery's calling.
After his 12-season playing career, which he finished as a minor league player/coach with the Missouri River Otters, Montgomery turned his full-time focus to coaching. His first break came as an assistant coach at Notre Dame under prolific head coach Jeff Jackson before moving on to RPI for four years.
In 2010, Montgomery got his first crack at being a head coach, leading the USHL's Dubuque Fighting Saints to the league championship in his first year. After suffering a second-round loss to the Indiana Ice the next year, Dubuque steamrolled the competition in 2012-13 (45-11-8 regular season record, swept two of three playoff rounds) on their way to their second championship in three years under "Coach Monty".
Given his successful USHL track record, it was not a surprise when Montgomery moved up the coaching ladder to the next rung: NCAA Division 1 heading coaching. Montgomery spent five seasons behind the bench for the Denver Pioneers, piloting the team to the 2015-16 NCAA championship in the Frozen Four at the end of a season that saw the team go 33-7-4. The team's biggest standout player was Denver native right winger Troy Terry, who is now an NHL standout with the Anaheim Ducks.
Impressed by Montgomery's work at lower levels, Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill hired him to become the NHL team's head coach in 2018-19 following Ken Hitchcock's largely unsuccessful one-year return to Dallas in which the team missed the Stanley Cup and efforts to reduce a sky-high team goals against average yielded a solid decrease (from 262 GA to 225) but had the side effect of the team only scoring 235 goals after previously ranking near the top in goals scored (but near the bottom in GAA) under Lindy Ruff.
Coming into Dallas, Montomery inherited a disjointed roster with a somewhat top-heavy lineup and a reputation for extreme streakiness and perceived complacency. With some exceptions, the team bought in for Montgomery. The team's goals against average dropped even further (2.46 GAA) although so did the scoring (2.56 GPG). More important, the team returned to the playoffs after missing the previous two years under Ruff and Hitchcock.
The turning point came in Jan. 2019. A few weeks earlier, Stars team president Jim Lites publicly ripped into the team's two best players, Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin. After the Stars suffered back-to-back losses to Scott Gordon's Flyers (2-1) and Craig Berube's Blues (3-1), the usually more even-keeled Montgomery laced into the entire team behind closed doors and also expressed his dissatisfaction publicly.
"I’m very frustrated that I have not been able to gain consistency in our performance, and I haven’t been able to change the culture of mediocrity,” Montgomery said softly during postgame media availability after the loss to St. Louis.
"I’m very frustrated that I have not been able to gain consistency in our performance, and I haven’t been able to change the culture of mediocrity.” pic.twitter.com/QINUwAaVOr
It was a risky button for Montgomery to push, but his players responded the right way. There was an almost immediate turnaround and the Stars surged in the second half of the season. In the playoffs, the Stars upset Peter Laviolette's favored Nashville Predators (the regular season Central Division first-place team) in six games. In round two, Montgomery's Stars and Berube's Blues waged a tremendous seven-game series, which the eventual Stanley Cup champion Blues won with a 2-1 overtime victory in the deciding game.
A big part of the reason for the Stars' turnaround was that Montgomery got buy-in from many of the Stars' most important players. Tyler Seguin, in particular, played arguably the best all-around hockey of his career over the course of that season.
There were also a few casualties, though. Former Dallas first-round pick Valeri Nichushkin never clicked with Montgomery, and slogged through an individually disastrous season (0 goals, 10 assists, 0 penalty minutes in 56 games plays). Nichushkin was placed on waivers and bought out over the summer. He subsequently revived his endangered career in Colorado. In 2021-22, Nichushkin produced 25 goals and 52 points despite missing 20 regular season games.
Montgomery has always maintained his good sense of humor and candor. I was on the same plane as Monty coming back to Dallas from the 2019 NHL Entry Draft in Vancouver. (Actually, I ticked my wife off because I finished a conversation with Jim before greeting her when she came with our daughter to pick me up at the airport). He said that he enjoyed having goalie coach Jeff Reese on his staff and said that his staff as a whole (Rick Bowness, Todd Nelson, and Kelly Forbes along with Reese) was a pleasure to work with. He said that he expected one addition coming to the staff (which soon turned out to be his former Phantoms teammate and longtime friend John Stevens).
As we walked into the baggage claim area, I asked Montgomery about the team's first-round selection of Thomas Harley at the Draft.
"Our scouts told me I should be happy, so I'm happy. I've never seen him play," he said. "I've been totally focused on coaching our team. So I rely on [Nill] and the scouts until I get on the ice with the young kids."
The next season, the Stars got off to a decent start over the first two-plus months (17-11-3) although there was still some of the club's characteristic streakiness that needed to be resolved. Unfortunately, Montgomery did not give himself a chance to be the man to take his team to the next level of consistency.
It was not a secret around hockey that Montgomery has battled an issue with alcohol dependency. The issue returned during his time coaching the Stars and, worse, he was responsible for an incident the organization euphemistically described as a "material act of unprofessionalism". He was fired on Dec. 10, 2019.
Assistant coach Bowness, himself an experienced head coach, took over behind the Stars' bench. There was a lot of continuity -- the same systems essentially stayed in place with only minor tweaks -- and both Bowness and a slew of Stars players made sure to give Montgomery a share of the credit when the Stars ultimately reached the 2020 Stanley Cup Final in a six-game battle with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
The COVID-19 pandemic, eventual cancelation of the final month of the 2019-20 regular season
and the conducting of a late summer to early fall Stanley Cup playoffs in the bubble in Toronto made the abrupt end of Montgomery's tenure seem further in the past than it actually was. But within the team itself, Montgomery and his staff laid much of the groundwork that Bowness finished off in the run to the Cup Final after going from assistant to head coach.
In the meantime, Montgomery went through an intensive rehab (in-patient) and took time away from hockey. By all indications, he has remained sober and repaired his relationship with his family. Montgomery always credits his wife, Bekki, for sticking by him. In an in-depth interview with Pierre LeBrun, Montgomery said that he still feels gulity for letting her, his staff, the Stars players and general manager Nill down. He has also said that his firing was 100 percent justified and strictly his own fault.
In September 2020, Montgomery accepted an invitation from the St. Louis Blues -- his original NHL organization -- to join Berube's coaching staff as an assistant. That's where he has remained the last two seasons. It's a two-year deal that expires on July 1, 2022. However, it is likely that a couple NHL teams -- possibly including the Flyers -- will seek permission to interview Montgomery after the postseason.
3) May 26 in memoriam: Peter Zezel (April 22, 1965 – May 26, 2009)
One of the biggest fan favorites of the 1980s, the late Peter Zezel was born April 20, 1965 in Toronto to Serbian immigrant parents. Drafted by the Flyers in the second round (41st overall) of the 1983 NHL Draft, the center went on to play 873 regular season games and 131 playoff contests in the National Hockey League.
As a hockey player, Zezel was best known as a hard-working forward who excelled on faceoffs and was an underrated offensive player in the early part of his career. He compiled 219 goals and a respectable 608 points during his NHL career.
Zezel spent four-and-a-half mostly happy seasons in Philadelphia. During that time, the Flyers made runs to the Stanley Cup Finals in both 1985 and 1987. His best season came in 1986-87 when he posted a career-high 33 goals and 72 points in 71 regular season games and then added 13 playoff points en route to coming within one win of the Stanley Cup.
Off the ice, Zezel was known as a caring, generous and fun-loving person whose greatest passion was teaching hockey and soccer to children. One of the most popular Flyers players of the Mike Keenan era, Zezel was a heartthrob among many young female fans with his matinee idol looks but also a highly respected player among all Philadelphia fans.
4) Today in Flyers History: Flyers Sweep Rangers in 1995 East Semis
Winners of the Atlantic Division championship during the abbreviated 1994-95 regular season, the Philadelphia Flyers signified their re-emergence as Stanley Cup contenders after the playoffs came around. They did emphatically, taking out the Buffalo Sabres in five games in the first round and then sweeping the defending Stanley Cup champion New York Rangers in the conference semifinals.
In Game Four of the New York series, the Flyers had to go into hostile territory to wrap up series. The tense Madison Square Garden crowd exhorted the Rangers to extend the series but grew quiet as first period even strength and power play goals by defenseman Karl Dykhuis - playing arguably the best hockey of his entire NHL career during this series - portended impending doom as the Flyers built a 2-0 lead.
The Legion of Doom line furthered the Rangers' suffering. Scoring his third goal of the series, Mikael Renberg tallied to build a 3-0 lead as game-long dominance by his line paid off with a goal at the 12:29 mark of the second period. Less than two minutes later, Rod Brind'Amour started a sequence that ended with Anatoli Semenov beating Glen Healey to build an insurmountable 4-0 lead.
The Rangers finally got a puck past Ron Hextall (31 saves) in the final minute of the second period, but there was to be no third period miracle for the Blueshirts. The Flyers prevailed, 4-1, and advanced to the Conference Final for the first time since 1989.
Although the Flyers ultimately lost a hard-fought six-game series with the eventual Stanley Cup champion New Jersey Devils, it was clear that, after a five-year playoff drought, the Flyers were going to be in the thick of the Stanley Cup hunt for many years to come.
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