Flyers fire coach John Tortorella in midst of another losing season
The Philadelphia Flyers fired coach John Tortorella on Thursday with nine games left in another losing season for a franchise that hasn’t been in the playoffs since 2020
John Tortorella popped off after another Philadelphia loss — the sixth straight on his watch — and declared he was not interested in learning how to coach a losing team in another empty season.
It's not his worry anymore.
The Flyers fired the notoriously brusque Tortorella on Thursday with nine games left in another losing season for a franchise that hasn’t been in the playoffs since 2020.
The decisive blow came when the Flyers were blown out by Toronto 7-2 on Tuesday night. Tortorella, who won a Stanley Cup with Tampa Bay in 2004, said after the game he was 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,” he said. "So this falls on me, getting the team prepared to play the proper way until we get to the end.”
The Flyers will get to the end without him.
The Flyers named Brad Shaw the interim coach, then went out and beat Montreal 6-4 on Thursday night.
Flyers general manager Danny Briere said the decision to fire the coach with the season inching toward the end wasn't necessarily because of Tortorella's comments. He noted they were just “one of things that happened along the way.”
“I feel there’s probably more the frustration of the game and getting shellacked there in Toronto. The embarrassment that we all felt,” Briere told reporters in Philadelphia. “I tend to be careful with that and not put too much stock into it. I put it more as he was frustrated with how things have gone lately, and he was embarrassed by the loss that night, just like a lot of our players were.”
The Flyers lost 11 of their last 12 games under Tortorella and won only six times over the last 25 — a massive blow for a rebuilding team that had mild playoff hopes entering the season.
“Is there one thing that happened? It’s not one thing. It’s a series of things that have happened, and probably a little bit more in the last three weeks, that has escalated since probably around the trade deadline,” Briere said.
Tortorella, who brandished his reputation as a fiery, no-nonsense coach on a team still mostly full of young 20-somethings finding their way in the NHL, went 97-107-33 for the Flyers and was fired with one year left on his contract.
The Flyers haven't won the Stanley Cup since the last of their two straight championships in 1975. They last played in the Stanley Cup Final in 2010.
Briere championed the job Tortorella did last season as he guided the Flyers to the last game of the season with meaningful hockey to play. The Flyers were widely predicted by experts, fans and oddsmakers to finish near the bottom of the NHL.
Briere preached patience over playoffs again this season, even with the ascension of rookie star Matvei Michkov, who has lived up to the hype with 54 points in 72 games. The 66-year-old Tortorella did come under scrutiny this season when he healthy scratched Michkov — who had two goals and an assist Thursday — or benched him for long periods, explaining it was part of a tough-love approach toward the Russian's development.
“Not everybody is able to take the hard coaching that John Tortorella put on Matvei. I’ve been amazed by how he’s responded to it,” Briere said. “You’ve seen him get benched, you’ve seen him get scratched, and what does he do? He comes back, and all he wants to do is stick it back to you, or stick it back to Torts.”
The Flyers have been dragged down by years of poor drafting, inadequate talent evaluation and churned through six coaches in 10 years before Tortorella was hired. Briere, a former Flyers standout, was named general manager in spring 2023 and promised he would revamp the organization from top-to-bottom and boldly proclaimed the team was set for a rebuild — a term management had long loathed publicly using.
The Flyers traded Morgan Frost, Joel Farabee and Scott Laughton at the deadline and slogged through a 1-6 homestand that ended earlier this month.
“It was tough reading some of the comments that were out there that, OK, this year was going to be the year,” Briere said. “I knew in my in my guts that we were still going to go through at least another tough year. This year, I knew it was still we weren’t out of the woods, and we were still part of that deep down rebuild, and we’ve seen that this year.”
The long road toward the playoffs goes on — only without the coach known as Torts on the bench.
“Torts is a complicated man, he’s a complicated coach,” Briere said. “He’s a blast to work with because he challenges you. I truly believe he made me a better GM. I loved working with him, and I think he loved working with me. He’s not a 'yes' man. He had opinions and he’s earned the rights to share his opinion, and we listened to him.”
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