Well that didn’t take long, did it?

Five days after being fired as head coach of the Bruins, Jim Montgomery was hired by the St. Louis Blues to be their bench boss, replacing Drew Bannister.

Montgomery, who had been in the final year of his deal with the B’s and had rejected a contract extension offer according to GM Don Sweeney, signed a five-year deal with the Blues on Sunday.

It was a meteoric rise for Montgomery in Boston and just – as precipitous a fall. In his first season with the B’s in 2022-23, his team set a record for wins (65) and total points (135) and he won the Jack Adams Award as the league’s top coach. After losing both Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci to retirement the following year, the B’s still remained highly competitive, getting caught by the Florida Panthers for the Atlantic Division regular season crown late in the regular season. He had a .715 winning percentage with the Bruins.

But the playoffs were a different story. The B’s were stunned by the Panthers in seven games in 2023, losing a 3-1 series and Game 7 in overtime on Garden ice. Last season, they needed a David Pastrnak Game 7 overtime winner to avoid the same kind of collapse after taking a 3-1 series lead. They lost to the Panthers in six games in the second round.

This season, the B’s never seemed quite right, from the season-opening blowout loss in Florida to the nail-in-the-coffin 5-1 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets last Monday. They were at or near the bottom of the league in offense, defense, power play and penalty kill before Sweeney finally pulled the plug last Tuesday, replacing Montgomery with long-time Bruin assistant Joe Sacco as interim head coach.

The B’s have hardly become an offensive juggernaut under Sacco, but the defense and penalty kill have gotten markedly better. In their two wins over Utah and Detroit since he took over, the B’s have allowed just one goal and 40 shots on net in the two games. They’ve also been a perfect 8-for-8 on the penalty kill.

Montgomery will take over a Blues team that is struggling, though they did beat his Bruins in the second to last game of his tenure in Boston, a 3-2 overtime win for the Blues eight days ago. The Blues are 9-12-1 and outside the Western Conference playoff structure, though still in striking distance.

It will be a homecoming of sorts for Montgomery. His wife is from the St. Louis area and the family owns an offseason home there. It was his first professional organization he played for out of the University of Maine and he was also an assistant on Craig Berube’s staff before coming to Boston, allowing him to regain his footing in the game after he lost his head coaching job in Dallas due to his well-publicized battle with alcoholism.

Unless there are any more staff changes coming, Montgomery will be joining another former Bruin coach on the bench, Claude Julien, who is an assistant in St. Louis.

Like his predecessor in Boston, Bruce Cassidy, Montgomery found work in less than a week after being fired by the Bruins. But he’ll be hard-pressed to continue following Cassidy’s trajectory. Cassidy won the Stanley Cup in his first season with the Vegas Golden Knights.

The Blues, however, are neighbors with the B’s in the bottom third of the league in all the major categories. Montgomery’s record, however, suggests that will improve.