Couturier has to rediscover himself for Flyers to excel
A model of professional excellence for the vast majority of his long career, Sean Couturier finally attained the status of Flyers captain in mid-February, one day after Valentine’s Day.
Showing him some love was something clearly delayed both by Couturier’s battle with back injuries over the course of nearly two seasons, and more recently by head coach John Tortorella’s reticence to commit a C to any jersey hanging in his team’s locker room.
Ah, but that finally changed when Couturier, who has been one of the organization’s most respected players and leaders dating almost to his rookie season of 2011-12, was handed the letter complete with a Danny Briere quote in a press release naming his former teammate the 20th captain in franchise history.
Tortorella? Well, it took him a little longer to get to know Couturier.
“He was a pain in the ass for me last year, because he wanted to play,” Tortorella said in a media session shortly after appointing Couturier his captain and Travis Konecny an alternate captain two months ago. “He did nothing but complain to me about this, that and the other thing.”
Not that it was a bad thing to do so.
“Listen, I respected him,” Tortorella said. “I’ve been in the league for a while and watched him from afar and always had a ton of respect on how he plays the game. I have a different level of respect for how he’s handled this situation. Two major operations, the aggravation from not having played for two years … just how he’s handled himself.”
Five weeks later, Couturier had gone from respected pain in the butt to a guy who couldn’t score, and worse than that, one who wasn’t keeping the kind of pace he’d always had to his game away from the puck. The former Selke Award winner was on the ice for a lot of opposition goals. Not that it made him different from many of his teammates, who had been slipping steadily.
When Tortorella responded with making the recently appointed captain a healthy scratch two games in a row, the Flyers reaped three out of a possible four points. So Tortorella figured it was a good time for Couturier to rejoin the mix. The Flyers promptly lost their next eight games, falling out of a playoff spot and essentially poisoning the season.
But it wasn’t so much the new captain’s fault as it was the whole crew.
“Yeah, it’s tough when your captain gets scratched,” Scott Laughton, the Flyers’ other alternate captain, said Wednesday. “I think he’s the leader of your team and you want him out there in key situations. … I think we’ve had different things for the last couple of years here and you deal with them. Like I said before, it’s your job to go on the ice and perform.”
Perform is what the Flyers did for much of the season. Paying customers in this “New Era of Orange” had been conditioned to believe — partly from failures in recent seasons, partly from the coach and the bosses telling them over and over that they were still “REBUILDING!” 12 years on — there was little use for playoff expectations.
That is, until it seemed in January that the Flyers were a solid bet to finish in a playoff spot. They were 25-14-6 after beating Dallas on Jan. 18 for a fifth straight win. They went 13-19-5 the rest of the way. The eight losses in a row from March 24 through April 9 were the death knell, but it had gone bad long before then. And really, what team that finishes deep in the NHL basement in power-play prowess (a mind-blowing 12.2% “success” ratio, nearly three full percentage points behind next-to-last Columbus) deserves to be in the playoffs?
As is his way, Couturier handled his scratches with typical aplomb. How he’s handling his season is a bit different.
Given the chance in Tuesday’s exit interview with the media to blame his late-season downturn on the fact that he hadn’t been able to play in nearly two years before that, Couturier refused to blame his injury troubles.
“I don’t think it’s an excuse. I mean, my body was feeling better as the year went on,” said Couturier, who wound up with 11 goals, 27 assists and a minus-10 rating in 74 games. “Earlier in the year, I was more banged up at times and got through it. So that’s not an excuse for my play. I just plain and simple sucked down the road. And I mean, it’s mental, I think a lot of it. Like you said, you don’t play for almost two, three years at that stage of the year. You go through some ups and downs throughout the years … and it’s how you handle them. I think I can maybe learn from this experience.”
And as for that two-game healthy scratch that Couturier now indicates came after a particularly bad stretch for him?
“I’ve tried not to look back at it,” he said Wednesday. “Honestly, it’s behind me now. I didn’t want to be a distraction or anything. I thought, actually, the team responded pretty well with the three points out of four the next two games. You know, I might have been caught up somewhat in some comments that were a little blown out of proportion, I think, just through my emotions. But like I said, it’s behind me.”
For Couturier, 31, this failure was particularly difficult. It’s an eighth year out of his past 12 with the Flyers that he won’t experience the playoffs. For the NHL, that’s hard to do. For the Flyers, it was once unthinkable.
Yet, from Tortorella’s morningskate chat before the last game of the season to Wednesday’s player interviews, and probably for Friday’s season-end media sessions with Tortorella and general manager Danny Briere, the plot line of the club beating expectations was a constant script.
It shouldn’t be — no matter how young and inexperienced the players, no matter how much into a first, second or third rebuild a club might be, no matter how hard the players worked to avoid the spin from going out of control.
Videos of losses near the end of the stretch drive to dead teams like Chicago, Columbus and especially the Montreal Canadiens (by 9-3!) should be replayed over and over, like they should replay in the minds of so many players before training camp.
No one knows that better than Couturier, who plans on coming back a different player than he was the last few months.
“Obviously, it stings right now, this feeling of not making it, especially with the situation we were in,” he said. “But maybe we use this as motivation to kind of raise our game to another level next year.”