Shocking NHL news was coming out of Dallas like a wild fire on Tuesday morning. Early that morning, the Dallas Stars organization announced that Jim Montgomery would no longer serve as the head coach for the Dallas Stars, effective immediately.
The Stars’ hockey community was completely blindsided by this news, because the Stars do have a winning record, and their overall play has been pretty good as of late. However, Jim Nill, the general manager of the Dallas Stars, stressed this was not a reflection of “on-ice performance,” but due to “unprofessional conduct,” as reported by The Dallas Morning News.
http://gty.im/1181688969Nill kept very tight-lipped about the events that lead to Montgomery’s release. He did not state what had happened to warrant the firing. It is believed that nothing criminal has occurred, although all we have is speculation to go off of. There’s one thing that we can definitely take away from this — what Montgomery did had to have been terrible to warrant this firing.
What we do know about the situation is that there was a phone call on Sunday that led to an internal investigation. The Stars’ investigation went on through Monday, and by Tuesday morning, the head coach had been released.
Rick Bowness, the Stars’ assistant coach, will now take the reigns as the interim head coach. Bowness has a long resume of coaching at the professional level and has a good relationship with the players. This will help smooth the transition over a little bit, but time will tell if Bowness can go from interim to full time head coach in Dallas.
More news on this matter may still come forward.
