Painful to watch, Tortorella’s Flyers only expose his boss’ failures
VOORHEES, N.J. » He wouldn’t need to see another one-shot power play. He wouldn’t need to see another forward be slow to the defensive end. He wouldn’t need any more film work. He wouldn’t need another 10-game losing streak.
John Tortorella, who has trafficked in hockey honesty since the late 1980s, would need only 23 games, most of them featuring horrifying hockey, to reach a franchise-redefining conclusion.
“We’re going to go through,” he said Thursday, after a Flyers morning skate, “a lot of pain.”
And won’t that forecast be a boost for the annual Santa Sack sales?
Totorella is new to this situation, and was hired to study what has made the Flyers so illequipped to win hockey matches and reveal his findings to the general manager. The minutes from the daily upper-andlower-body reports have been grim — it’s the Flyers, after all, and that’s their eternal curse — but the situation is deeper than that. The system is so painfully fractured that Tortorella literally might as well be running a youth-hockey clinic.
While he elected to revive the Flyers, Tortorella had a reasonable expectation that Cam Atkinson and Sean Couturier would play. He envisioned a team with a healthy James van Riemsdyk, Scott Laughton and Travis Konecny, all of whom have needed injury time. He convinced himself that there was some talent in the pipeline. Didn’t happen.
So?
“Where we are as a team is that we are grass roots as far as teaching,” he said. “We are just beginning to teach.”
Building takes time, and Tortorella is on a four-year contract for a reason. He can figure things out. But in a couple of weeks, Chuck Fletcher will begin his fifth calendar year as the general manager. He has had time. And yet all he has given his head coach in a period of injury crisis are players who need to be taught how to play the sport.
That’s the major leagues. There may be the odd exception, but no player credentialed to rock an NHL logo on a gameused sweater should ever require “grass roots” instruction.
“We’ll get healthy and get some guys in,” Tortorella said. “But we’re just beginning.”
Tortorella, who needed four seasons to lead the Lightning to a Stanley Cup, has the resume to say he deserves some run-up time. Fletcher, however, long has been accumulating late charges on his account, and yet there he was Thursday pretending he’d just showed up two shifts ago. He has had enough time to fire coaches and run four drafts and to try to convince Flyers fans that signing Nick Deslauriers was an inspired idea at just about the time he was declining to recruit Johnny Gaudreau. But suddenly, he was ready to dig in with his latest coach to finally get it all right.
About time.
That had been Fletcher seated next to Dave Scott about a year ago plotting an “aggressive” rebuild. But only a general manager out of answers could allow an “aggressive” rebuild to turn into “grass roots” teaching, and then allow a Hockey for Dummies clinic to yield a forecast of extended rebuilding “pain.”
“A lot of things have changed from that point,” Fletcher said. “But even going back to the summer we talked a lot about my opinion. Clearly, we have had a lot of injuries. We’ve dealt with a lot of adversity. But our culture wasn’t right. We didn’t have a team identity. We didn’t defend well. We talked about our work ethic and our ‘compete.’ But by bringing in Torts, the goal was to reestablish an identity of how we want to play, how we want to work, how we want to defend. And we thought that
was really critical to fix.”
Because the Flyers are so talent-free that he has little choice, that’s what Tortorella is doing. The plan is for him to spend the time before the March 21 trade deadline to give Fletcher a name-by-name report card.
“As a coach, I will decide about a player, ‘Is he part of this? Do we want him as a part of this? Or, you know what, he’s not a Flyer,’” Tortorella said. “Then you work through it.”
Basically, Fletcher is about four months from being told by his head coach how to remake the roster. Figure that to be his last chance, no matter how often he talks to Scott.
And how did the late Ed Snider’s never-retreat franchise ever hit such depths?
“I feel very strongly that you get stuck in the mud if you just put band-aids on and use gimmicks to put people in the building,” Tortorella said. “You get people in the building by winning. And the only way you win is by building it the proper way. And that’s how we’re going to go about it.”
With that, he prepared to head to the Wells Fargo Center for Game 24, no matter how much it had a chance to hurt.