Tortorella has no answer for injuries, lack of talent
There wasn’t much hope late last season that the Flyers were going to become contenders any time soon, but at least the titled know-it-alls were committed to halting the fall.
There was general manager Chuck Fletcher, saying his team was a player or two away from substantial improvement. There was CEO Dave Scott, who was running things at the time, vowing, “we’re going to get this right.” There were the typical noises squeaking from the players that it was just a matter of a break or two.
Then, eventually, there would come John Tortorella, a coach who would rarely tolerate failure. And even though he had been around the NHL long enough to know a decrepit roster when he saw one, he had a plan to generate a turnaround.
“We’ve got to get some skin,” he said, about the same time his four-year, $16 million contract was signed. “We’ve got to grow some skin.”
Toughness. That’s what Tortorella would demand. Pride in the franchise, and in specific, pride in the emblem. A determination to find a way to win no matter the circumstances. “I want,” he had said, “this team to be harder.”
The team is not harder.
And Tortorella’s job, as it is turning out, is harder than he and any horror novelist could have believed.
There were the Flyers the other night, after dragging a point out of a trip to Montreal, back in the Wells Fargo Center for a game against Calgary, a pretty good team from the Pacific Division but nothing special. It would take them less than five minutes to fall behind and less than 14 to trail by two. They needed Tanner Laczynski, rescued from Lehigh Valley that afternoon, to score his first career goal to avoid a steamrolling, received only pedestrian goaltending from Carter Hart and saw a losing streak hit seven.
“We were flat,” Tortorella said. Just a little.
That hardly was all the fault of the head coach. The Flyers were ill-constructed to begin with, and have been made recently to play without almost every decent player they are paying. James van Riemsdyk is out. Travis Konecny. Scott Laughton. Wade Allison. Sean Couturier, their best player, hasn’t played all season. Cam Atkinson is out. Ryan Ellis is still waiting to play his fifth game in two years. The team Tortorella was assigned to coach Monday was barely of major-league quality, too slow, too timid, too unable to zip back on defense … and certainly too “Who’s-he and where-did-hecome-from?”
It has been mentioned that Chuck Fletcher is the wrong general manager for the wrong team at the wrong time in the wrong city, and the sooner he is blown out of Voorhees the sooner something can be done about a franchise so lacking in depth that it wouldn’t have a decent candidate for a bobblehead night. But that’s later. What about now?
That’s a theme Tortorella has been confronting of late. He knows he doesn’t have the players to compete for anything but the No. 1 overall draft pick, but he was hired not for a long-term project but for a short-term one. “An aggressive re-tool,” is what Fletcher promised.
So maybe it begins Friday, when the Penguins visit, in Game No. 20, a customary point for a little self-reflection?
No?
“It’s hard for me to make a judgment on the team,” Tortorella said, “because of all the injuries,”
So, he won’t, and instead will look for hope, even if it takes deep squinting. After the shootout loss in Montreal, Tortorella made one of his infrequent postgame visits to the locker room to spread some feel-goods. He would try to cherish the point. But what about that “be harder” jazz?
“It was probably one of our best games,” Tortorella said. “And we find a way to lose.”
They lost, then lost again, and
are nearing the kind of consistent losing that got Alain Vigneault fired. The difference is, the Flyers are so injured and so lacking in skill that even a $4 million a year coach with an edge is low on solutions.
“You want me to give you a judgment on who we are,” Tortorella said. “I can’t. I said, ‘Maybe talk to me in December.’ I can’t, because I don’t have enough players that I feel ‘is’ our team with us. But I respect how hard they played in Montreal.”
So slap that on the orange Tshirts: “We almost beat Montreal!” … then drop them as gifts over the seats, including the
many going unused anymore.
“It’s a long season,” Travis Sanheim said. “There are just certain games you aren’t necessarily going to have that energy. We got to find a way to stick with it. We just have to find some ways to win hockey games.”
It is a long season. The injury wave will recede. Tortorella is making faces at some veterans, a hint that changes are nigh. Eventually, the fall will end.
At least that’s what the bigshots keep promising.