2 days Ago By Conor Ryan
By Conor Ryan The Bruins made their coaching reshuffle on Tuesday afternoon, firing Jim Montgomery after a little over two seasons as head coach. In the subsequent move, Boston named longtime assistant Joe Sacco as the team’s interim head coach. Sacco, 55, has been on Boston’s bench for over a decade, and will now look to right the ship for a disappointing 8-9-3 Bruins roster.
“I believe Joe Sacco has the coaching experience to bring the players and the team back to focusing on the consistent effort the NHL requires to have success,” Bruins GM Don Sweeney said in a team release on Sunday. “We will continue to work to make the necessary adjustments to meet the standard and performance our supportive fans expect.” Here are five things to know about Boston’s new bench boss.
Sacco is no stranger to the Bruins’ bench. Before taking the reins of the Original Six franchise on Tuesday, Sacco served as an assistant for three different Boston head coaches in Claude Julien, Bruce Cassidy, and Montgomery. Sacco was hired by Boston in July 2014, joining his hometown team after spending 11 years as a coach in the AHL and NHL.
After spending his first 10 seasons with Boston as an assistant, he was promoted to associate coach this past July, which elevated him ahead of the team’s other assistant coaches, Chris Kelly and Jay Leach. “Not a lot will change with my role, really,” Sacco told The Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont of his offseason promotion . “But this should give me the chance for Jim and I to talk more .
.. about things I’m seeing, and vice versa, during games.
I don’t have to be as focused on matchups as much as Jim is, and Jay will be watching more over the defensive aspects of our game.” As noted by Dupont, Sacco entered the 2024-25 campaign tied with Carolina’s Jeff Daniels with 10 years as an assistant with their respective clubs, the most among active NHL coaches. Now, he will get a chance to try and lead Boston out of its current malaise.
“I’ve always felt like I’d like a second chance,” Sacco told Dupont. “I’ve looked around at a lot of guys that coached their second time around ..
. they’d had moderate success [the first time], but when they got that second opportunity, they really took off.” Sacco has plenty of local ties, including putting himself on the map as an NHL prospect during his days at Medford High School.
After totaling 114 points (52 goals, 62 assists) over his last two seasons (41 games) at Medford High, Sacco continued his collegiate career at Boston University. He spent three seasons with the Terriers from 1987-90, where he scored 63 goals and 128 total points over 111 games in a scarlet and white sweater. Sacco had several teammates at BU who ended up in the coaching ranks, including Mike Sullivan (1986-90) and David Quinn (1984-88).
BU made the Frozen Four in Sacco’s final season on Commonwealth Ave., with the team ultimately coming up short against Colgate at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena. A fourth-round pick (71st overall) by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1987 NHL Draft, Sacco appeared in parts of 13 seasons in the NHL.
In total, he appeared in 738 games between the Maple Leafs, Ducks, Islanders, Capitals, and Flyers. Sacco recorded 94 goals and 119 assists for 213 points over the span of his NHL playing career, with his most productive season coming with the Ducks during the 1993-94 campaign (19 goals, 37 total points). While Sacco wasn’t a top-six stalwart at hockey’s highest level, he carved out a lengthy career with his profile as a steady, defensive forward.
He retired at the end of the 2002-03 season, making the jump into coaching with the AHL’s Lowell Lock Monsters, Albany River Rats, and Lake Erie Monsters from 2004-09. Sacco’s reputation as a detail-oriented, two-way forward made him a natural fit as Boston’s PK coach over the years — with the Bruins establishing one of the most consistent shorthanded units in the league over the past decade. “They’re unbelievable,” David Pastrnak said last year of working against Boston’s PK unit.
“It’s terrible practicing against them. Sometimes you think your [power play] should get better when you practice against the best PK in the league, but our PP is getting worse from that.” Since Sacco first arrived in Boston ahead of the 2014-15 season, the Bruins have posted a top-10 penalty kill in seven of his 10 full seasons with the team, including a pair of first-place results in both 2022-23 (87.
3 percent) and 2016-17 (85.7 percent). Even after the loss of stout PKers like Patrice Bergeron and Tomas Nosek during the summer of 2023, the Bruins finished last season with a seventh-ranked shorthanded unit (82.
5 percent). Sacco has taken an active role over the years in crafting scouting reports for opposing power-play units during his time with Boston. “The PK basically, for me, it’s just about giving the players the accurate information that they need going into the opponent that we’re playing on that particular night, trying to find their strengths as a group, what they do well on their power play, what are their tendencies and what we can do to try to take that away from them,” Sacco told The Boston Globe’s Jim McBride last season.
“It’s not anything that is new, it’s just you look at a power play and you say, ‘OK, they have a tendency to do this, and this is option one, this is option two. What can we do to take that away or how are we going to take that away from them?’” Despite Sacco’s track record, the Bruins’ PK — like several other areas of strength this fall — have completely eroded in 2024-25. Boston ranks 25th on the penalty kill through 20 games (75.
6 percent). This is not Sacco’s first opportunity to coach an NHL roster. After spending two seasons coaching the Avalanche’s AHL affiliate in Lake Erie, Sacco was promoted as Colorado’s head coach in June 2009.
He was named a finalist for the Jack Adams Award, given annually to the coach who has contributed the most to his team’s success, after leading the Avalanche to a 43-30-9 record and a playoff berth in his first season at the helm. Sacco ultimately went 130-134-40 with the Avalanche from 2009-13. The Avs fired him after a 16-25-7 lockout-shortened campaign in 2013 and three straight seasons without a playoff appearance.
Sacco has already filled in at times as Boston’s head coach, taking over for Cassidy during his six-game, COVID-related absence during the 2021-22 season. The Bruins went 3-1-2 record with Sacco behind the bench over that stretch. “You grow from your experiences as a coach,” Sacco told Dupont last season.
“You’re going to be a better coach the second time around. So, yeah, sure, if the opportunity is there, and presents itself and it’s the right situation, I would like to take a crack at it again. But I feel very lucky to be in the position that I am [with the Bruins].
” Conor Ryan Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023. Boston.
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