John Tortorella lashed out after another loss for Philadelphia — the sixth in a row under his leadership — and said he wasn’t interested in learning how to coach a losing team in another disappointing season.
That’s no longer his concern.
The Flyers fired the blunt Tortorella on Thursday with nine games left in another season where the team failed to make the playoffs, continuing a stretch without postseason action since 2020.
The tipping point came after a 7-2 loss to Toronto on Tuesday. Tortorella, who won a Stanley Cup with Tampa Bay in 2004, said after the game that he wasn’t “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 finish the season without him.
The Flyers named Brad Shaw as interim coach, and the team responded with a 6-4 win over Montreal on Thursday.
Flyers general manager Danny Briere explained that the decision to fire Tortorella wasn’t just because of his comments, adding that they were “one of the 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.”
Under Tortorella, the Flyers lost 11 of their last 12 games and only won six out of the last 25. It was a major setback for a rebuilding team that had some hopes of making the playoffs.
“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, known for his fiery and direct coaching style, had a record of 97-107-33 with the Flyers and was fired with a year remaining on his contract.
Brad Shaw calls out to his team in the 1st periodThe Flyers have not won the Stanley Cup since their last title in 1975, and their most recent appearance in the Stanley Cup Final was in 2010
Briere praised Tortorella for his work last season, guiding the Flyers to the final game of the season with meaningful hockey to play. The Flyers were expected to finish near the bottom of the NHL, but Tortorella helped them exceed those expectations.
Briere had called for patience again this season, even with the rise of rookie star Matvei Michkov, who impressed with 54 points in 72 games. However, Tortorella faced criticism when he scratched or benched Michkov for long stretches, saying it was part of his tough-love approach to help Michkov grow.
“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 struggled due to years of poor drafting, bad talent evaluation, and the frequent turnover of coaches, with Tortorella becoming the sixth in just 10 years. Briere, a former Flyers player, was named general manager in 2023 and promised to rebuild the team from the ground up.
He openly embraced the idea of a rebuild, a term management had avoided in the past.
The Flyers traded Morgan Frost, Joel Farabee, and Scott Laughton at the trade deadline and faced a difficult 1-6 homestand 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 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 journey to the playoffs continues — just without Tortorella at the helm.
“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.”
