Flyers: Tortorella Was an All-In Hiring, Just Not All-In on Rebuild

The Flyers have spent the better part of the last month continuing to strip away pieces to acquire more assets for the future. The ongoing pain of a current six-game losing streak and losses in 11 of the last 12 games comes with the territory. 

It was always supposed to be this way. That’s the strategy employed by teams in a rebuild. And when you decide to go down that path, you need to have everyone on board.

Which brings us to Thursday morning, when the Flyers made their most recent subtraction. John Tortorella is out as head coach.

When something significant like this happens, you tend to circle back to where it all began and try to find the reasoning behind it along the way. That would be June 17, 2022, the day the Flyers hired John Tortorella as head coach.

Tortorella was always an interesting choice as head coach. He was an all-in choice. This is the coach you hire when you’re ready to compete for a Stanley Cup, not when you want to trim the dead weight and go through a rebuild.

At the time, though, the Flyers weren’t in a rebuild. They weren’t in anything. They had a general manager trying to make a move to save his job and a faceless organization that needed a face. That was John Tortorella.

Tortorella became exactly what the franchise wanted him to be. His first season behind the bench was very much a learning experience, finding out what you have and weeding out the players that didn’t fit. That included the general manager. Chuck Fletcher was fired on March 10, 2023. 

Over the next several months, GM Danny Briere started to shape the roster. Ivan Provorov and Kevin Hayes were traded. Tony DeAngelo was bought out. They drafted Matvei Michkov. In the middle of all of that, Tortorella was part of a group that announced a “New Era of Orange” in May. Briere was officially named GM. Keith Jones was named President of Hockey Operations. Dan Hilferty had fully assumed the ownership representation role. And collectively, the three stood by Tortorella as the right man for the job to help lead the Flyers back to relevance.

Tortorella’s second season turned out to be a surprise. The Flyers were competitive. It was a classic John Tortorella team – lunch pail mentality, playing above expectations, shocking the hockey world one game at a time. With 11 games to go, the Flyers appeared poised to make the playoffs, even after admitting the rebuild was in full effect.

Then, they collapsed. They lost eight straight games and nine of the last 11 and missed the playoffs. As the season slipped away, you could sense Tortorella’s frustration building.

It left questions about Tortorella’s future then. But the Flyers stood by the veteran head coach and he remained behind the bench going into the 2024-25 season.

To this point, the 2024-25 season has followed the more traditional rebuild path. More players have been moved. The team is positioned to have a much better draft pick. Playoffs were never really part of the conversation. But as the losing piled up, particularly in the second half of the season, the frustration mounted again. And Tortorella, as blunt and honest as he can be after a game, said something that he could not take back.

“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 postgame on Tuesday. “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. But I have to do a better job. So this falls on me, getting this team prepared to play the proper way until we get to the end.”

Tortorella probably didn’t intend for that to be taken so literally, that he has no interest in coaching. But how do you read that statement and not take it in the literal sense. The coach has no interest in coaching this type of season, this type of situation? How do the players feel about that? How about management?

That was likely the final straw for Tortorella. Amid the benchings, the typical buttons he has pushed time and time again over his coaching career, it wasn’t speeding up a rebuild. It wasn’t helping with development. It was creating a step back much larger than anyone could have anticipated after the near-playoff season in 2023-24.

Many will look at Tuesday’s comments and suggest that Tortorella signed up for this, signed on to oversee a rebuild and shouldn’t have expected anything less. But he didn’t. He was hired by a different regime that wouldn’t go down the rebuild path. He was hired to try to save a franchise that was floundering in mediocrity. When it became apparent that wasn’t possible, the general manager was gone, and his successor went to that much-needed strategy. 

Now Tortorella was along for the ride on a rebuild. And for a while, he said a lot of the right things, about having to eat it and feeling pain to get to the other side. But he didn’t change his actions enough. He stuck to the benchings – sitting newly-named captain Sean Couturier last February brought some tension to the locker room – and stuck to the style that wasn’t helping the team evolve or take a step forward. 

He also always kept his future hanging in the balance. He leaned into the relationship that was building with Briere and Jones, and expressed that if at any point they felt it was time for a change to show him the door.

Briere did that on Thursday. It may have been inevitable after the season anyway. Tuesday’s comments just made it even more necessary.

Kevin Durso is Flyers insider for 97.3 ESPN. Follow him on social media @Kevin_Durso.