It’s not often that a Jack Adams Award-winning coach has to prove himself the following season.

It’s not often that a Jack Adams Award-winning coach has to prove himself the following season.

However, that may just be the case for Jim Montgomery.

The guy that led the Boston Bruins to a historic regular season was the same one who failed to make productive adjustments in a meltdown first-round playoff exit that, albeit, had a list of other culprits to also place blame on.

Montgomery’s body of work in the regular season should offer more reassurance than the seven-game postseason sample, but the bench boss’ responsibility has heightened ahead of the 2023-24 campaign.

The absence of Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci and Nick Foligno not only leaves holes in the lineup, but in the locker room. Montgomery said it throughout his first year as the B’s head coach –– that leadership group was something special and was a tremendous help to Montgomery finding his bearings and gaining respect from his roster.

Montgomery was given a team that didn’t need a whole lot of tweaking last year. The top six was all but a given, and the lineup played to the team identity that Bergeron helped cultivate through 19 seasons in the Black and Gold.

While the lessons and legacy of the now-departed veterans will continue to be the cornerstones of the franchise, the Bruins will have a new look this season and Montgomery has the opportunity to put his unique mark on the squad.

“What I like is we have tremendous opportunity. I know we have great players, I know we have really good leaders. For me, the exciting part of it is ‘how good can we be?’” Montgomery said in an interview last week with Steve Conroy of the Boston Herald.

The answer to Montgomery’s “how good can we be?” question lies more within his own power than it ever has. The Bruins output, specifically offensively, arguably leans more now on Montgomery’s configuration of his players instead of his stars turning it on when the team needs a boost.

Guys like Trent Frederic and AJ Greer could look to eat up some more minutes while the recently acquired Morgan Geekie and James van Riemsdyk could be poised to earn a stable and meaningful slotting in the nightly lineup.

“I don’t know what our ceiling is yet and that’s what makes this training camp a little more exciting than last year’s, because there’s a lot more moving parts … some people look at it as daunting,” Montgomery said to the Herald.

“I don’t. I look at it as an opportunity for a lot of players to become real good Bruins for us and for us to find our identity as a team and how we’re going to win games this year.”

Montgomery’s approach through training camp and the season will be more hands-on than last year and, considering his coaching career as a whole, that’s what he’s truly good at.

Before landing in the NHL, Montgomery had nearly 10 years of NCAA experience –– developing young players and pushing guys to their highest potential –– and also had a three-year stint at the helm for the Dubuque Fighting Saints in the USHL.

Having a star-studded pool of players hasn’t always been the norm for Montgomery, and if the Eastern Conference’s 2023 playoff performances taught anything, it was that you don’t necessarily need the biggest names to succeed.

As he has proven, Montgomery knows his guys and has a good pulse on the room that’s aided by his open communication. While bittersweet, Montgomery is crafting the “new era” Bruins and, in-hand, will reveal different layers of his coaching style and abilities to a city that needs to be convinced to have faith in its team again.

“We have to make sure — and this is a big part of my job — that our standard of how we treat ourselves, how we care for each other remains the same,” Montgomery said to the Herald.

“We can’t let our standard of competitiveness and caring slip. And that’s probably my biggest thing to make sure of this year, besides getting people to execute with pace and purpose.”