With nine games left in the 2024-25 season, the Flyers made a rather interesting move, firing head coach John Tortorella. Yeah, when your team started tanking late last season when you had them in the playoff race, and has yet to recover, changes need to be made. I’m all on board with that.
What’s strange though, is why fire Tortorella now, with nine games left in the 2024-25 campaign? Did general manager Daniel Briere want to give interim coach Brad Shaw an audition? If so, is nine games enough for Shaw to prove he’s capable of being the next bench boss?
To me, it makes zero sense to fire a coach with nine games left in the season any way you look at it. Yeah, the team was ailing under Tortorella, so we all had an inkling Briere was going to make a change. But why not fire him sooner and give Shaw, if you’re indeed considering him to be the coach in 2025-26, more of a sample size to work with?
Why fire John Tortorella with nine games left in the season?
Nine games is less than one-ninth of the entire NHL season, so you can see why I’m questioning this move. No NHL executive in their right mind would give an interim coach they may be taking a long look at nine games to prove their worth.
On the other side of the equation, firing Tortorella so late in the season even if Briere isn’t considering Shaw as the successor is also strange. The 2024-25 NHL season will end in roughly three weeks, so you couldn’t keep Tortorella on the job any longer?
And with Shaw stepping in as the interim coach, this doesn’t look like a situation that St. Louis Blues general manager Doug Armstrong pulled earlier this season. To jog your memory, Armstrong fired head coach Drew Bannister after the quarter-season mark and replaced him with the recently-fired Jim Montgomery.
But the timing made sense, and it was clear Armstrong had a plan in place. From this angle, Briere’s move looks nothing short of reckless. Did he want to get rid of Tortorella for a while now? If so, why not fire him a month ago and give Shaw more time?
Was it something Tortorella said earlier in the week?
The only iota of logic here is a quote from Tortorella earlier in the week, when he said, “I'm not really interested in learning how to coach in this type of season, where we're at right now. But I have to do a better job, so this falls on me, getting the team prepared to play the proper way until we get to the end."
That could explain the timing, but again, there’s nine games and roughly three weeks to go. You could justify Briere letting Tortorella go because of that quip, but at this point, does it make any difference unless you’re interested in seeing what Shaw could do?
Still, you already know my take on it - if Briere was that interested in Shaw, why wait so long to replace Tortorella with him? Right now, there are a lot of questions here, and hopefully we’ll get answers while this plays out. Until then, we can only sit back, listen to different takes on this, and see what ultimately comes up.