Blues fire head coach Drew Bannister, hire Jim Montgomery as replacement

The St. Louis Blues have fired coach Drew Bannister and hired Jim Montgomery as his replacement, just five days after the 2022 Jack Adams Award winner was let go by the Boston Bruins.

Blues president and GM Doug Armstrong announced the stunning change Sunday.

Bannister had been on the job in St. Louis for less than a year since succeeding Stanley Cup-winning coach Craig Berube and getting the interim tag removed after last season. The Blues have lost 13 of their first 22 games.

The Blues signed Montgomery to a five-year contract.

Montgomery spent two seasons as an assistant on Berube’s staff in St. Louis, between head coaching gigs in Dallas and Boston. The Bruins fired him less than a quarter of the way through the season given their rough start.

The 55-year-old left the Bruins with an 8-9-3 record this season and a 180-84-33 mark in his career, which also included a one-plus season in Dallas.

The Bruins finished with more than 100 points in each of Montgomery’s first two seasons — including a record-setting debut, when their 65 wins and 135 points were both the most in NHL history. But the team lost in the first round of the playoffs that year and advanced to only the second round last season.

A genial hockey lifer who led the University of Maine to the 1993 NCAA title as a player — scoring a third-period hat trick in the final — Montgomery played in 122 NHL games over six years before he turned to coaching. He won two U.S. junior titles and led Denver to an NCAA championship before he was hired by the Dallas Stars.

In his first season on the bench, Dallas made the playoffs for the first time in three years. In his second, the team would reach the Stanley Cup Final, but without Montgomery. He was fired 32 games into the year for what the team called unprofessional conduct.

Montgomery has since admitted to binge drinking to the point of blackouts and conceded that he deserved to be fired. After going through rehab, he was hired as an assistant in St. Louis and then for the head coaching job with the Bruins.