PHILADELPHIA — What seemed for a long time this season as inevitable finally came down Thursday, as Flyers head coach John Tortorella was fired with only nine games left in another sad season.
Tortorella’s Flyers, who were apparently on their way to the playoffs last year until spinning through an eight-straight losing streak amid the final few weeks of the season to drop out of contention, have appeared to lose more than mere games in the final weeks of this season.
By losing 11 of their last 12 games entering a game against the Montreal Canadiens Thursday night, the Flyers went from a team that harbored dreams of a late run to get back in the playoff race at the start of March to one that at times appeared to lose all interest in games.
They also had a head coach who literally spelled out that team mood.
“This falls on me,” Tortorella said Tuesday night after a 7-2 disgrace of a loss in Toronto. “I’m not really interested in learning how to coach this type … 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 to get to the end.”
If there was ever a way for a coach to prepare for losing his job, essentially saying he wasn’t interested in coaching “this type of season” seems like it. You didn’t have to dig too hard beneath those words to see how Tortorella was feeling about his team, and probably that feeling was mutual.
“You’re going to ask me is there one thing that happened, it’s not one thing,” general manager Danny Briere said prior to the Canadiens game Thursday. “It’s a series of things that have happened, and probably a little bit more in the last three weeks.”
Briere added the reason for the sudden firing of Tortorella – which many observers saw as inevitable in the offseason – was “an accumulation of (things) that have happened, and probably more often lately.”
Such as that stinging quote Tortorella said on live TV after the loss in Toronto on Tuesday night?
“It’s one of the things that have happened along the way,” Briere said. “But there’s not one specific reason.”
Either way, the Flyers’ losing ways had spun out of control. While “tanking” is a media-hyped sports tag that doesn’t often apply to NHL teams, the Flyers’ drop out of sight certainly invites such labels. They entered the Canadiens game at 28-36-9 for 65 points. That point total was next to last in the Eastern Conference, with the Buffalo Sabres the lone trailing team at 64.
But the Sabres had played three less games than the Flyers at that point.
While Briere made some noise about evaluating interim head coach Brad Shaw for the last nine games, suffice to say the Flyers can only look forward in the spring to finding yet another head coach to replace an interim body there, then turn to preparations for the NHL Draft. That’s essentially been a common spring calendar items for them during the 2020s. This year will mark the fifth straight season they’ve missed the playoffs, a streak of incompetence they last attained in the pre-Eric Lindros era of 1989-90 through 1993-94.
At least during that five-season stumble they were usually in contention for a playoff run into the last few games or so. Not so this year, where the hopes of early March seemed empty even then. What has happened since can be related to the trades of Joel Farabee and Morgan Foster, two young veteran players, and team leader Scott Laughton in the days leading up to and including the trade deadline.
“We made some tough trades we feel are going to set us up for the future, but in the present time put us at a disadvantage,” Briere said. “It’s not fair to blame Torts or our coaching staff for that. Torts was on board with that. He understood that was part of the plan, that was part of the phase of the rebuild we were in. So that was not an issue.”
What was an issue was all the losing. Tortorella, a historically successful coach – in this ridiculous league, successful coaches always get fired, too – has now been canned five times as an NHL head coach. For the always rebuilding Flyers, his clubs went 97-107-33 over nearly three full seasons. Not bad considering the general lack of talent.
“It’s not easy,” said Briere, who kept his interim head coach and players away from the media before the Thursday night game. “That’s probably the toughest part of the rebuild, is going through this. I really hope that this is the bottom, that this is rock bottom today and that this is the turnaround.
“It’s tough to send good players elsewhere and not really replace them. … That was taking a toll on all of us, Torts included. He hates losing probably more than anybody we know.”
Briere and team president Keith Jones are supposed to have the green light to actually use the rusty key to the organizational purse strings this summer and play at least a modest role in free agency. Before that they’ll be players in the June draft. Not only will they have a premier spot early in the first round by their own accord, they also own two other first-round picks via deals with Colorado and Edmonton.
By then, they are likely to have another new head coach in place to see if there’s a way to escape what has become an embarrassing period of time for a once proud franchise.
