Flyers should replace Tortorella with patient coach as rebuild enters next phase

PHILADELPHIA — John Tortorella said he wasn’t the man for this type of situation, and now he no longer is.

Less than 48 hours after a 7-2 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, Philadelphia Flyers general manager Daniel Briere announced Thursday morning he was relieving Tortorella of his coaching duties and replacing him in the interim with assistant coach Brad Shaw.

“As we move into the next chapter of this rebuild,” said Briere via press release, “I felt this was the best way to move forward.”

We don’t know how he could’ve felt otherwise after Tortorella said, following the loss to Toronto, he wasn’t inclined to do what the Flyers needed him to through the next chapter of their rebuild.

“When you’re in this type of situation, and you’re losing all the time, and there’s nothing at the end of the tunnel for you, there’s certainly going to be some frustration,” Tortorella said. “But this falls on me. I’m not really interested in learning how to coach in this type of season, where we’re at right now…”

Tortorella talked about trying, but the Flyers don’t need someone who must learn how to handle this situation right now. They need someone with the patience to teach their players through this difficult moment — as the losses pile up and they move into better draft positioning, and as player development is prioritized over results.

Tortorella has a lot of good qualities as a coach, but patience isn’t one of them. He’s a hard-driving taskmaster who helped the Tampa Bay Lightning to their first Stanley Cup before making mostly successful stops in Vancouver, New York and Columbus.

The coach accumulated 673 wins, 37 ties and 132 extra points in overtime or shootout losses over 1383 games in those places before helping the Flyers to more wins than they were expected to earn through the first year of their rebuild.

“He set the standard of play and re-established what it means to be a Philadelphia Flyer,” said Briere about Tortorella, who carried his team to an improbable 35-26-9 record through 70 games before it ran out of gas and fell out of a playoff spot over their final 12 games last season.

This season proved far more challenging, as expected, and it didn’t get any easier after Joel Farabee, Morgan Frost, Scott Laughton and Erik Johntson were traded ahead of the deadline. The loss to the Maple Leafs Tuesday was Philadelphia’s 11^th in their last 12 games and their sixth in a row, giving them the NHL’s 28^th best record (28-36-9) through 73 games and burning up the rest of Tortorella’s limited patience.

In Tuesday’s game, he didn’t have any of it. He benched 24-year-old Cam York after the defenceman completed his eighth shift.

Earlier this season, rookie Matvei Michkov, was scratched from a couple of games and he sat for long periods of others.

Mistakes from Farabee and Frost were rarely treated as teaching moments by Tortorella before they shipped off to assume larger roles with the Calgary Flames.

Not that Tortorella should apologize for any of it. A big part of his success as a coach in this league was never mincing words or sparing egos.

It’s why, as a young player for the 2004 Stanley Cup winning Lightning, current Montreal Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis often clashed with Tortorella.

But it’s also why St. Louis always respected him.

“I think your own truth becomes more accurate as you age,” said St. Louis on Thursday, shortly after news broke of Tortorella’s firing and hours ahead of the Canadiens playing the Flyers. “He pushed me to be more honest with myself. He led me in that direction because he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth to anyone. I think that’s why I have a good relationship with him, because it wasn’t always flowers between us.”

With the Flyers spiraling and 66-year-old Tortorella approaching the final year of his contract, he wasn’t about to soften his approach.

Not that the Flyers should be looking for Tortorella’s successor to take it easy on the players and undo some of the culture he worked so hard to rebuild. But given where they’re at in their process—with young players like York, Michkov and Owen Tippett starting to gain valuable NHL experience, with prospects Oliver Bonk, Jett Luchanko, Emil Andrae and Nikita Grebenkin rising through the ranks, and with other high-end players surely being added to the system through a draft in which the Flyers possess three first-round picks and four second-round picks—they need a coach who can tolerate some mistakes instead of punishing all of them.

A coach like David Carle, who led Team USA to consecutive world junior championships and has been leading young players at Denver University since 2018, immediately comes to mind, even if Vancouver Canucks coach Rick Tocchet (who’s on an expiring contract and had a legendary playing career with the Flyers) is on the tip of everyone’s tongue right now.

That’s the type of coach St. Louis was hired to be for the Canadiens in February of 2022, as they pushed their team through a youth movement and prioritized player development over the two-and-a-half seasons leading into this more competitive one.

“He kind of taught the game from scratch and that’s gone a long way into our team game now,” said Cole Caufield ahead of Thursday’s game, which could help the Canadiens further secure the second wild-card position in the Eastern Conference.

“Probably not every coach has that level of patience or teaches the game that way, and I think it’s been huge for our success as a group,” Caufield added. “To have somebody like that, that’s going to stick with you and grind it out just like the players are, I think that’s huge.”

Perhaps Shaw can be that person for the Flyers.

Perhaps it’ll be Carle, or Tocchet, who gained that type of coaching experience with the Arizona Coyotes. Or maybe there’s someone else the Flyers will hire to do it.

Up until Tuesday, they were willing to stick with Tortorella through at least the end of this season.

But when he said after the loss to the Leafs that he had to learn how to deal with their current situation and added he had to “do a better job” preparing the team to “play the proper way,” that appeared as though it could change. And whatever happened in between led to Thursday’s decision, which was fully endorsed by Flyers governor Dan Hilferty and president of hockey operations Keith Jones.

“On behalf of the entire Flyers organization, we would like to thank John for his dedication over the past three seasons,” they said in a joint statement. “We fully support Danny’s decision in making this change as he continues to do what is needed for the future of our organization.”

Briere will address the media at 5:00 p.m. ET., and hopefully provide clarity on how he sees that future now that Tortorella is no longer a part of it.

More from Sportsnet

NHL Power Rankings: Checking in on top prospects for all 32 teams

Convincing loss to Blues serves as wake-up call for Canadiens