Mellower Torts still has the stuff to instill change
For his next act, Flyers president of hockey operations (a fancy title for a GM) Chuck Fletcher is replacing another lost interim coach with the kind of veteran head coach the club has favored the past couple of decades: A wellknown guy who has won before, just not enough, during several recycling tours around the NHL.
Say hello to John Tortorella, who according to multiple reports (and a league source Thursday night) will likely be introduced Friday as the Flyers’ new head coach.
Former NHL goalie Kevin Weekes, an analyst for NHL Network and most recently ESPN, who had broken the story about Tortorella and the Flyers earlier in the week, reported Thursday that the two sides had reached an agreement on a fouryear deal averaging in the neighborhood of $4 million per season.
That’s down a bit from the five-year contract worth $5 million per season that Alain Vigneault drew from Fletcher when AV was hired in 2019, replacing interim Phantoms promotee Scott Gordon.
Vigneault lasted through the height of COVID, managed to win a playoff series – the first time a Flyers coach achieved that since Peter Laviolette in 2012 – but was gone by Dec. 2021, before his contract was halfway through. Um, so that means they’re still paying him more than the next head coach.
That’s some $9 million total for those two, plus heavy nuts for former assistants Michel Therrien and Mike Yeo (if he’s indeed gone).
Anyway, despite their diverse public personas, Vigneault and Tortorella could be seen as similar coaches on some level, doing everything they can to win, yet approaching that ideal with different personalities. Mr. Nice Guy and ... well, Torts.
Tortorella has long made it his business to be as tough on players as he is on certain media members. He might be personally responsible for getting New York Post writer/ puncher Larry Brooks into the Hockey Hall of Fame. While Tortorella was coach of the Rangers, he and Brooks had an almost daily verbal sparring session in front of other reporters before and after games, in the Garden as well as on the road.
To be honest, I missed a lot of Flyers interviews on nights of Rangers games because I had to get a good standing spot for the Tortorella post-gamer, which usually featured Brooks as co-star. But Tortorella also used the media to call out certain players he felt weren’t doing their jobs.
It was way more entertaining than any “work hard” quotes readily available in the usually losing locker room, I can tell you that from experience.
Alas, Torts is getting, well, a little more seasoned now. He’s a week away from birthday No.
64, which is older than Vigneault was when he got hired here. In fact ... Tortorella is even older than Roger Neilson was when that brilliant guy took over for Wayne Cashman late in the 1997-98 season at 63.
In fact ... correct me, oh Twitterheads, if I’m wrong, but the Flyers are about to make their oldest head coaching hire in history. This in an age when change, a move toward youth in the coaching ranks and the belated development of hockey analytics are, things to be pondered elsewhere.
Yes, the Flyers have made analytics hires. And there’s no reason to think Tortorella is going to kick any of the computer guys out of his office. But either way, Fletcher says, we’re going with the soon-to-be 64 Torts ... if only because
59-year-old Barry Trotz said no?
All of that isn’t to say John Tortorella won’t be as fired up as ever with this new challenge. After all, this Flyers team he’s taking over is a hot mess that needs to be fixed. Too much youth, some of it with overassessed talent, a top center in Sean Couturier who missed much of last season with injury, a perennially overmatched defense with a star in Ivan Provorov who’s been off his game for two seasons, a goalie in Carter Hart that a handful of seasons in people are still trying to figure out...
Should be fun. But if anybody can kick them into shape, it’s Torts.
In some ways, Tortorella is like (Ken) Hitchcock 2.0. When the now (essentially) retired Hitch wanted a little more motivation from Jeremy Roenick back in the early 2000s, he talked about JR screwing up in his daily hour-or-so-long press briefing.
He also spent time at a dry erase board teaching media members the intricacies of what the hell he was talking about, and admittedly, I don’t see Tortorella
schooling the media with a smile on his face anytime soon.
But when Hitchcock was engaged in a playoff series, the post-game (and pre-game) trash talking with the other coach was as much of a part of his game plan as anything he had the players doing. Foremost in his Flyers stay was the trip to the Eastern Conference finals in 2004, and a series of blood, guts and great play ... along with awesome coaching quotes. It went seven games against a Tampa Bay team coached by a young spitballer named John Tortorella.
He’s had to have mellowed a bit by now, of course. After all, after five years of entertaining battles on the ice and in the press scrums with New York, he spent six seasons as a head coach in Columbus, Ohio before hibernating in a broadcast booth last year.
Nice zoo in Columbus. Ohio State’s campus is cool. And although the town’s NHL hockey team has been kind of popular since a veteran coach named Ken Hitchcock introduced
it to the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in 2006 – something that was achieved again only once there until Tortorella took them to the playoffs four times – it’s not exactly a sports market that feeds off of controversy.
Created or otherwise. In that context, Tortorella’s Columbus experience was far from New York. And considering the deflated state of the media these days everywhere, and Philadelphia is absolutely not an exception, the post-game air around the Flyers in 2022-23 will actually be a lot closer to Columbus than New York for Tortorella. Fire-breathing media sessions are essentially things of the past in sports, and with this once proud Flyers franchise, the expectations have rarely been lower anyway.
On occasion, however, should he feel the need to call out a player or two through the media, Torts shouldn’t have a problem.
Always easier that way.