If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard about locker room problems persisting in Philadelphia, divisions, accountability issues, lack of confidence, and lack of motivation, I’d be a relatively rich man.
All that’s ever come out from the walls of the Wells Fargo Center since at least 2011 has had something to do with strifes in the locker room. Sometimes they’ve come out to the public, other times we’ve had to add 2 and 2 together to piece the puzzle.
Things were apparently so bad that John Tortorella knew about the issues before he even took the job, let alone coached a game. 6 games into their new campaign, they look different, lighter, and playing for a purpose, compared to other years that started out sluggishly and playing for the sake of playing – in other words no motivation, urgency, or confidence.
A big part of the solution has been Tortorella, no surprise there. The head coaches of yesteryear haven’t held the same aura, fieriness, or haven’t been as tenacious as Tortorella and it shows. It’s hard to imagine that Dave Hakstol was able to command the lost locker rooms during his tenure after having never coached an NHL game before, it’s hard to imagine interim head coaches really having that kind of an impact either in Scott Gordon or Mike Yeo, and Alain Vigneault might’ve been the closest to Tortorella but he dealt with his players in a different way that clearly left a bad taste.
Now of course, it’s only been six games here for Tortorella and we’re probably in the honeymoon phase of his coaching tenure this year, but even if you date back to his time in Columbus or New York, you have ex-players coming to his rescue and having his back whenever he gets criticized for something that is obtusely incorrect – or so it seems. Even currently on the Flyers right now, players like Cam Atkinson and Kevin Hayes were steady voices over the offseason in backing their new head coach and it seems like the theme for most of the locker room is that they need the tough love approach. They have come out and said Tortorella will let you have it, no matter your standing on the team, and any misstep could lead to future repercussions – a la benching Hayes and Travis Konecny in Sunday night’s loss to the San Jose Sharks.
Hakstol was brought in for several reasons, one of the main ones being that he would be able to develop the young players that Ron Hextall was going to funnel into the NHL roster. I guess you could say he had a tough love approach as well because he had a knack of benching young players like Konecny, Shayne Gostisbehere, and Oskar Lindblom for veterans like Jori Lehtera, Chris VandeVelde, and Brandon Manning to name a few.
Alain Vigneault had a similar approach as he benched Nicolas Aube-Kubel time and time again for his inopportune penalties, he stunted the growth of Konecny as well under the same guise as he didn’t want him to play with the same in-your-face style that he was known for, and players like Gostisbehere, Jakub Voracek, and Nolan Patrick all had quarrels of some kind that eventually got them booted out of Philadelphia.
Is that to say that the same thing won’t happen to Tortorella? No, but he’s lasted a long time wherever he’s gone with the exception of Vancouver. He was the assistant coach in Buffalo for 6 seasons between 1989-90 and 1994-95, he was the head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning for 7 years from 2000-01 to 2007-08, he was the head coach for the New York Rangers for 5 seasons from 2008-09 to 2012-13, and he was in Columbus for 6 seasons from 2015-16 to 2020-21. In other words, that’s 535 games as the bench boss for the Lightning, 319 games for the Rangers, and 447 for the Blue Jackets.
No Flyers head coach has lasted that many years, let alone games, since Mike Keenan’s 320 games between 1984 to 1988 or Fred Shero’s 554 from 1971 to 1978. Dave Hakstol is currently third on the list for most games coached at 277, ahead of Peter Laviolette’s 272, Paul Holmgren’s 264, John Stevens’ 263, Pat Quinn’s 262, and Ken Hitchcock’s 254. The magic number for Flyers coaches’ years seems to be four, plus or minus a year with Laviolette entering his 5th season and Vigneault being terminated in his third.
Tortorella has had a reputation for being hardheaded, too mouthy, and tough to deal with, but if that were the case then I don’t think he’d have lasted with any of those franchises for that long. The coaching carousel hopefully ends with Tortorella and gives the players a stabilizing force behind the bench because several current Flyers have had far too many head coaches in their ear.
Sean Couturier has been a Flyer since the 2011-12 season and has gone through six head coaches and interim coaches, and it will be seven once he suits up this season. Scott Laughton has also been around for all seven coaches, Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, and Travis Sanheim have been around for five, and even newcomers like Kevin Hayes and Justin Braun have been around for three. It’s kind of tough to improve and develop when you’ve had that many different coaches, let alone coaching staffs teaching you new systems and then you have to forget what you just learned to adapt to a new one with the cycle continuing.
If Tortorella is a big part of the early solution, is there more to the story? Claude Giroux was a Flyer for 15 seasons, 1,000 games, was a storybook franchise player, and put everything he had on the ice for this team. That part can never be forgotten or pushed aside. However, after 15 seasons with the same franchise, with all the changes that occurred around him that included seven head coaches and four general managers, something has to give. The core shifted from Mike Richards, Jeff Carter, Simon Gagne, Daniel Briere, and Kimmo Timonen to Claude Giroux, Jakub Voracek, Wayne Simmonds, Brayden Schenn, and eventually Sean Couturier. Over that time the team never improved, in fact you could make the argument that they got worse, the core eventually split with the exception of Couturier, and there’s a different feel with this team because of it.
Change of scenery is sometimes necessary and obviously I can neither confirm nor deny any reports of Claude Giroux being the problem within the Flyers locker room, but with accountability, confidence, and motivation being the key cogs in the unsuccessful years of Flyers hockey, how much blame goes to the general manager, the front office, the coaching staff, the leadership group, and the players? What piece of the pie does each level get blamed for?
With a franchise legend like Giroux gone, there are big shoes to fill, and now that the Flyers don’t necessarily have that franchise player anymore, everyone has to group together to win games. No more insistence that the offense runs though player A and player B. The Flyers don’t have those players anymore with the departures of Giroux and Voracek, and now Tortorella has to band them together and get the best out of each individual. How many seasons did we have to go through under Giroux and Voracek where the secondary scoring was non-existent, and subsequently so were their playoff chances?
The dark ages of Flyers hockey has definitely gone though 2010 onwards, as there hasn’t been a stretch in franchise history this bad and this dull. This is a franchise that only missed the playoffs 8 times between its inception in 1967 and 2012 – 5 of which came in consecutive seasons from 1989-90 to 1993-94. They then qualified for the postseason in 11 straight seasons and 16 of the next 17. Since then, they’ve missed the playoffs six times in a 10-year span.
There has been so much player personnel reshuffling over the last few seasons that the air has to be clearer now that only a few players remain from the old regime. New faces, new voices, and new blood is what’s going to turn things around on the ice. Much to the chagrin of the fan base, not much can be done in terms of shuffling the ownership group and front office. So our focus is on the on-ice product and what Tortorella can get out of this group – a group that currently doesn’t include Sean Couturier, Ryan Ellis, Cam Atkinson, and Rasmus Ristolainen due to injuries.
The Flyers don’t have a captain for the first time since 1992-93 and only for the second season in franchise history. Scott Laughton is the only player with a letter on his jersey and it seems like that’s going to be the plan for the rest of the season unless Tortorella changes his mind. The Flyers don’t need one leader right now, they need a collective unit, a group of players to lead this team out of the dark ages and mentor all the young players under the age of 25 that occupy a roster spot.
Tortorella has answered a lot of questions ahead of the regular season regarding the direction of the team, why they didn’t go after Johnny Gaudreau, and how he can help. His responses have remained the same all throughout and gives us a glimmer of hope that he can restore the reputation that this once-storied franchise held. Success was a given in the regular season for the Flyers, they have held the second-highest winning percentage in NHL history (excluding the newly-minted Vegas Golden Knights) for a long time, have consistently qualified for the playoffs, advanced to the Stanley Cup Finals on a decade by decade basis until recently, and have been one of the most valuable franchises – according to Forbes – for as long as we can remember.
We need this team to be fun again, especially with how successful the other sport franchises in the city of Philadelphia have been. The Eagles are a perfect 6-0, the Phillies have advanced to the World Series, and the Sixers are in a championship window with Joel Embiid and James Harden.
Emily Kaplan of ESPN wrote an article that detailed Tortorella and the changes he’s implemented and within the article was an important sentence that depicted that the Flyers held a “country club” vibe in the locker. According to several players including Atkinson, the hiring of Tortorella has taken that away and in it’s stead has come an all-for-one and one-for-all mentality that everyone has to buy into.
Step one in their plan back to relevancy was trying to empty the locker room of its negativity, old and bad habits, and instilling them with an actual system to play under. Structure has been lacking and there might not be a better coach suited to fix this mess than the fiery Tortorella, who over his career has taken mishmash rosters further than anyone’s ever anticipated before.
Hopefully the Flyers fall under that trend.
