And here we are. The Flyers announced that they have terminated the contract of head coach John Tortorella with nine games left to go in this season and a full year to go on his contract. He is ninth all-time in NHL coaching wins (770) and perhaps could have passed Al Arbour (782) had this year gone better.
He is also second all-time with wins for an American-born coach, just behind former Flyers coach Peter Laviolette (841, just eight away from tying another former Flyers head coach, Ken Hitchcock). His 97 wins at the helm of the Flyers place him 11th out of the 23 (now 24 coaches, with Brad Shaw) coaches behind the bench. It's a shame the team couldn't have gotten him three more wins to reach the century mark.
The Tortorella Era will take some time to digest. We won't fully understand the impact of what he has done until years from now. Did he help the team? Did he hinder the team?
There are some positives. He took a team that had gotten used to losing and pushed them to be better. You can argue that the most important thing he did was to turn Travis Konecny into a star player. He also got the most out of hard-working players like Noah Cates and Nick Seeler.
When he came here, nobody had any expectations. His first year was rough, but they did a lot better than they had performed under Alain Vigneault. In his second season, the team almost made the playoffs, collapsing in the last few weeks and missing out on the last day of the year.
Maybe, we thought, the rebuild was ahead of schedule. After all, with Matvei Michkov coming in, we could do it. Nope. Michkov has been good, but he isn't a savior. At least not yet. While some players have improved, others have stagnated and never delivered. We saw this with Morgan Frost, Joel Farabee, and could be seeing it now with Cam York. This season has been kind of a disaster, considering we had some hope heading into it.
There were other drawbacks, too. The salary cap has long crippled this team and they couldn't get some of the talent that could've made this team better. For whatever reason, the power play continues to struggle, although it had been struggling before Tortorella got here. The penalty kill, so good last year and at the beginning of this season, just collapsed. The goalie situation, which we knew was going to be a mess at the beginning of this season, has gone completely to crap since Christmas.
So now what? How many more steps back are we taking now?
Yes, you could cite personality problems. Tortorella had issues with Kevin Hayes, Tony DeAngelo, Frost, and York. There are probably others that we won't know about because they aren't as publicized. We know he pushed his guys, be they vets or rookies, hard and tried to fit them into his system. Was his system the best for this team? Maybe or maybe not. His focus on a strong work ethic, however, cannot be understated, and those lessons could carry over for years to come.
With that in mind, the Flyers have a rather young corps of players. Some of those lessons (working hard hustling to the puck, protecting the puck, smart passing, etc.) could embed themselves and continue on in the years ahead. After all, they are lessons that are worth learning. After all, turning Konecny into a dangerous penalty killer was an amazing little trick. The foundations he established could be present for years to come.
At the same time, perhaps a new coach, Shaw or his replacement, could unlock some of the hidden offensive talent while embracing some of the defensive strengths. Or, maybe we'll learn a lesson that some of the prospects just aren't as good as we've convinced ourselves, and the fire sale will continue.
John Tortorella wasn't fired because the team didn't make the playoffs. Looking at this team, there is nothing scary about it. He tried his best with what he had. Hell, Daniel Briere has put together the best team he could have with the roster mess he inherited. It kind of looks like everybody, including the coach, just gave up on each other. It is what it is. Whatever the reason is, Briere felt that it is time to move forward, although with nine games to go, it is kind of a head-scratcher.
However, if Tortorella's comments from the other day show that he has lost control of this team and he has lost faith in them and himself to lead them, than he needed to go. He doesn't deserve it, and neither do the Flyers. Maybe a new coach could make this an exciting place to play if you are a pending free agent, or it could scare you away.
This upcoming offseason for the Flyers just got more interesting. More stuff will be coming out, I'm sure. For right now, it's easy to get hard on Tortorella for the job he did. However, we need to give him credit for bringing respectability back to this franchise. It may not have panned out as we had hoped, but then again he had told us over and over in the last three years that this team was far from a playoff-bound team.
On that, he was correct and always honest with us. How much farther away are they? Only time can tell us the answer to that. Hopefully, the seeds he planted will sprout into something positive down the line for the Flyers.
This season didn't turn out the way we had hoped. Perhaps the high expectations doomed it from the start. We hope that the Flyers can find their true direction soon and can right the ship. As for Tortorella, we wish him the best in his future endeavours and hope he will be successful there. He tried his best with what he had. Unfortunately, he didn't have the best of things to work with.