Yesterday, the St. Louis Blues made a couple of additions to the coaching staff, hiring Greg Cronin and Vinny Prospal as assistants to head coach Jim Montgomery. Cronin will be in charge of the defense and the penalty kill units, while Prospal will coach the forwards and the power play.
It may also signal that the Blues front office is preparing to move on from Montgomery at the helm.
The 2025-26 season did not go well for the Blues: they had lousy goaltending for most of the year until Joel Hofer seized the reins, and the rest of the team turned it on when it was too late to make a playoff push. A lot of the blame can be put upon the players themselves, but the coaching staff isn't innocent either--Montgomery and the now-fired Mike Webber and Claude Julien were unable to get their message across, and that failure showed on the ice.
In hiring Cronin, the Blues have added a coach with experience at the top of an NHL team, though Cronin's results with the Anaheim Ducks were mixed. His abrasive, defense-first coaching style all but chased Trevor Zegras out of town and stymied the development of some other critical young players. The lessons didn't seem to stick, either: under Joel Quenneville, the Ducks were an offensive power house, but played with very little structure.
If the Blues get off to another rocky start in 2026-27, it doesn't feel like Montgomery's going to get the same kind of leash he did last season. Adding Cronin to the coaching staff appears to be an insurance plan from the front office, and a warning to Montgomery that a lackluster October and November could mean the end of his tenure in St. Louis.
Add us as a preferred source on Google