Hired to be fired, can a coach make a difference?
The argument often made in sports is that no matter someone’s managerial or coaching salary, it’s the bench bosses that always get fired, not the players. That held true for Joe Girardi, who knew he had to win entering the last season of his deal, had to be happy to see the Phillies sign storied sluggers Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, then looked on as they flopped out of the gate.
With a collectively strong effort from their starters and typical inconsistency from the bullpen, the Phillies were 22-29 when team president Dave Dombrowski pulled the plug on Joe the Bummer June 3, replacing him with bench coach Rob Thomson.
“Everybody’s a little bit different,” Thomson, a longtime Girardi associate and good friend, said that day. “They manage the game a little bit differently and the manager’s got the final say. The bench coach, the hitting coach, the pitching coach … they try to provide information, but eventually the manager’s got the final say. I’m a little different than Joe. I’m not going to go into those differences, but I like to think I’m prepared and a good communicator with these guys. The plan is to make sure that all these guys know where they’re supposed to be at any given time.”
Just more than two weeks later, as they were preparing for a Saturday afternoon game in Washington, the Phillies weren’t where anyone expected them to be. Although the Mets keep winning and the second-place Atlanta Braves have been streaking, the Phillies have won 14 of the 16 games Thomson managed to rise into a solid third-place spot in the National League East, creeping to within eight games of the division-leading Mets and 2½ of the NL’s second wildcard spot.
Not bad for a club a couple of weeks removed from being considered dead in the water.
Ah, but everyone knows Girardi won’t have to call it a career if he doesn’t want to. His services will be wanted in the not-so distant future by TV networks and
teams in need of a past winner in the dugout. After all, Major League Baseball is a recycling plant of managerial talent. That’s true, too, for the NHL, if only because head coaches usually have barely enough time to decorate their offices before being asked to leave.
For now, though … enter one John Tortorella.
Freshly announced Friday on Zoom as the Flyers’ 23rd head coach, the oldest guy ever hired as head coach by the Flyers (63 years, 11 months and 23 days), Tortorella was as passionate and maybe slightly less feisty than the old Torts. Ah, but give him time … even if NHL general managers generally don’t give any coach enough time.
“Coaches hate hearing that, that there is a shelf life for a coach. We hate hearing it,” the rejuvenated Tortorella said. “As the game has gone on here and where the athletes are at now, the type of athlete we’re coaching now (takes) more and more communication,
which is terrific. Again, there’s a fine line, though, because you can create a monster, too, and allow it to get too far away from you.
“But I do think there is a shelf life for a coach. … You ask any coach. I listen to Butchy.”
“Butchy” would be Bruce Cassidy, an outlaw who wasn’t on the outs very long after the Bruins canned him for no apparent reason. Vegas snatched him up fast.
“We all know that’s going to happen,” Tortorella said of the NHL’s renowned quick-trigger, quick-hire front office style. “That’s the world we live in and it’s not our decisions. Listen, out at Columbus, I was there for six years. Jarmo (GM Jarmo Kekalainen) and I had some honest conversations after my fifth year. I felt it was time for me to go. I think I did the stuff I needed to do. I could see the team was going to change. I couldn’t do the same things and building the team with the people that just went through building the club, if that makes sense. I think we kind of came to ‘it’s time to go,’ (but) I stayed another year and didn’t have a good year.”
All of which doesn’t address one burning question: What’s the difference between a firstyear veteran head coach named John Tortorella and a sixth-season head coach named John Tortorella in Columbus? He didn’t wear on anyone because a lot of the players he coached there were transitioning out. And the media contingent was much smaller in Columbus than during his five-year newspaper war in New York.
And speaking of New York … Joe Girardi won a World Series in the Bronx in 2009. How much different of a manager was he when the Yankees had enough of him in 2017 after a 10-season stint?
If the managers or coaches aren’t changing that much, maybe it’s the situation around them, which might lead one to wonder … what difference does it make who’s hired?
Think Tortorella is a better coach than Alain Vigneault? I doubt
Torts would. But then, he isn’t a general manager. Chuck Fletcher is the GM of the Flyers, and for his second costly hire of a win-worthy veteran NHL head coach in three years, he needed several advisors by his side, months of talks, a professional executive search firm’s expensive input, and another multi-million fistful of dollars to hire … a guy who everybody around the league has known since the 1990s.
“We wanted to really take a long look into what we wanted and who we wanted as a head coach,” Fletcher said. “We were looking for an experienced, respected coach. Preferably somebody with extensive NHL head coach experience. We were looking for somebody with a lengthy track record of success. We were looking for somebody that had demonstrated ability to introduce structure and reduce goals against, improve penalty killing, make life easier for our goaltenders. We were looking for someone with a proven ability to hold players accountable to a high standard.”
He was looking for somebody like the last somebody he hired in 2019. But why quibble about the past even when you’ll be paying two head coaches next season at $9 million per?
Fletcher didn’t need a search firm to tell him that even at nearly 64 years old, Tortorella will bring a passionate, demanding, occasionally manic and always biting edge to the job. But the question remains, what will he do that the other guy(s) didn’t?
Figure he has at least 2½ years to provide that answer. But hey, that might be longer than Thomson gets.