"You feel terrible as a group, individually, that we let a really good coach and a really good person down."
Brad Marchand has skated in a black-and-gold sweater for 16 seasons now.
Over that stretch, he's seen three head coaches -- all with Jack Adams Awards on their mantle -- handed their pink slips.
The Bruins captain might be the elder statesman of the team. But several key cogs in Boston's room are no strangers to coaching upheaval.
In total, there are still seven players who were present when Bruce Cassidy was given the boot in the summer of 2022. Both Brandon Carlo and David Pastrnak were also with Marchand in February 2017 when the team parted ways with Claude Julien.
And now, a Bruins team short on results and all too familiar with coaching reshuffles is ready to bring in its fourth coach in eight years in interim bench boss Joe Sacco.
"Very disappointing day. Also very frustrating," Marchand acknowledged after Boston's first practice after Jim Montgomery's firing. "This is a reflection of our play and it was avoidable. And I think that's the tough part about this, is that if we would have done our job in here, he'd still be around.
"So you feel terrible as a group, individually, that we let a really good coach and a really good person down. And the effect it has, not just on him, but on his family. It's a crappy day."
Marchand's comments reflected a common theme in a somber Bruins dressing room on Wednesday -- with an underachieving 8-9-3 roster looking to pick up the pieces after Montgomery's ousting.
"You feel a big part of the guilt because at the end of day -- us players are the ones performing out there and we weren't getting it done," Pastrnak said. "And because we weren't getting the job done, we lost a great coach and an amazing human being. So it's tough."
While every team must contend with free-agent departures, cap-related moves, individual regression, and the erosion brought upon by age, the 2024-25 Bruins have completely plummeted in just about every facet of their game through 20 matchups.
Don Sweeney pointed to a listless training camp as one contributing factor to that malaise.
But Charlie McAvoy stressed that what brought the Bruins to this new low can't be chalked up to one incident -- nor can the reasoning behind their lackluster play revolve around one flaw.
"I couldn't point my finger on it," McAvoy said. "You want to go back to camp, or the beginning of the season, or, whatever it was -- we lost it, we lost it for a minute," McAvoy said of the standards set in Boston. "And this is life, and these things happen. But today you wake up and you realize that you still have the best job in the world, playing for the best team in the world, the best organization in this game.
"I'm lucky and I'm blessed to be here. And today was a day of gratification, self-reflection, and then realizing that, holy -- we have 62 games left, and we're still in the playoff spot, or somewhere near it, so we got everything to play for. And that's the crest, that's each other, that's that's everything, and it's all going to be alright."
McAvoy stressed that mental toughness needs to be drawn more out of a group that has seemingly squandered what little momentum they've been able to seize this fall.
The Bruins have yet to win three games in a row, while their minus-21 goal differential is tied for the second-worst mark in the NHL alongside the bottom-feeding Sharks.
The 2024-25 Bruins may not have the scoring depth to comfortably pad leads and run teams off the ice. But Boston's humbled dressing room believes it has the means to negate the head-scratching lapses in discipline and defensive structure that have put them on the wrong side of some lopsided scores.
"You need to have a competitive edge and level that you're willing to go to that other guys aren't, and we haven't done that enough, and we did have that for a very long period of time," Marchand added. "But it took a lot of really good leaders and competitive guys coming here to say that they wanted to be a difference maker and build something special.
"And we have the group to do that. We have the group that has the ability. There's a lot of guys that have been underperforming this year, myself included."
Sweeney played his hand on Tuesday by cutting ties with Montgomery. Boston's general manager promised more wholesale changes moving forward if the uninspired product on the ice doesn't improve.
McAvoy believes such measures won't need to be taken.
"I think we have everything that we need in this room," McAvoy said. "I haven't wavered in that belief -- at all. You just have to get back to the simplest things, the foundation of what we are: working and competing, and that's it. There's too much skill. There's too much talent in this room where that won't click and come together at some point."