March 27, 2025
The Flyers have relieved John Tortorella from his duties as head coach, the organization announced Thursday morning.
Associate coach Brad Shaw, who has been in charge of the Flyers' defense and penalty kill, will take over in the interim.
The Flyers have nine games left this season, beginning with Thursday night against Montreal at home.
They've lost six straight games, are amid a 1-10-1 spiral going back through their last 12, and with their latest defeat to the Maple Leafs on Tuesday night in Toronto, a 7-2 thrashing, the team was left looking completely despondent.
“Today I made the very difficult decision to move on from John as our head coach," Flyers general manager Danny Brière said in a statement. “John played a vital role in our rebuild. He set a standard of play and re-established what it means to be a Philadelphia Flyer. John's passion on the bench was only equaled by his charitable work in our community. As we move into the next chapter of this rebuild, I felt this was the best for our team to move forward. I'd like to thank John for his tireless work and commitment to the Flyers."
Tortorella was hired as the Flyers' head coach in the summer of 2022 by former GM Chuck Fletcher. At the time, the Flyers were directionless. A series of quick fixes and shakeup moves didn't work, Claude Giroux's run reached the end of the line and he was traded away, and the roster that was left was underwhelming, underachieving, and generally met with apathy from the fan base.
Tortorella, long known as one of the league's fiercer coaches, was tasked with reinstilling accountability among the team, and along the way, oversee the development of the Flyers' younger players, which became much more prominent once Brière took over as the GM and the process of a rebuild was plainly stated.
There were successes. The Flyers surprised many with a playoff push that lasted most of last season until it all stalled out at the end; Travis Sanheim, Rasmus Ristolainen, Cam York, and in flashes throughout this season, Jamie Drysdale have all taken steps forward as defensemen; Owen Tippett showed capable of reaching after 30 goals; and Bobby Brink, Noah Cates, and Tyson Foerster have established themselves as unrelenting two-way forwards.
But there have been failures, too, and some glaring ones.
There have been many benchings and healthy scratchings, with some warranted, some questionable, and in certain cases, some never fully addressed. Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee, up until they were traded to Calgary a couple of months ago, both saw them. Brink and Sanheim, too, and even Sean Couturier as the captain wasn't safe. Matvei Michkov, as the prized rookie, arrived three years ahead of schedule, but with that, it was almost inevitable that at some point, Tortorella was going to sit him down, and he did, numerous times – with each passing one getting put under heavier and heavier scrutiny from the outside for fans that wanted to see their future star play.
It also grew increasingly concerning that, in this season, several key players and the team overall regressed.
Tippett has struggled with consistency all year and has disappeared through the month of March, and when they were still here, Frost and Farabee had hit a clear wall in their play until they were both shipped over to the Flames. Travis Konecny only recently snapped a goal-less drought for himself on a roster that can't produce much offense otherwise outside of Michkov, the power play has sat among the worst in the NHL for the past three years with almost no improvement, and the team's goaltending picture, once again, is unstable.
But the breaking point appeared to have been reached Tuesday night in Toronto.
The Flyers were skating with a roster stretched thin and stuck in another losing streak, with nothing seemingly able to break it regardless of how hard they tried, and their fate by that point clear: they were missing the playoffs again.
Pregame, Konecny told reporters that the team was missing Scott Laughton's presence in the locker room, and that the longtime leader's trade to the Maple Leafs at the deadline was going to take them the whole summer to fully regroup from.
Tortorella, also earlier in the day, bluntly stated that he knows where the team is at and that the players do, too, but that it was his job to see them to the finish line with whatever positives they could muster and carry forward into next year.
Then the Flyers stepped onto the ice. Cam York got bodied off the puck without much fight in a sequence that led straight to the Maple Leafs' first goal. The top-pairing defenseman, who is due up for a new contract this summer, got benched for the rest of the night after just 3:50 of ice time, while the rest of the team proceeded to get pummeled in a second straight defeat where they got tagged for seven goals against.
The Flyers looked like they had nothing left, like they just needed the season to be over, and then Tortorella delivered what quickly got picked up as a damning quote postgame.
"When you're in this type of situation, you're losing all the time, and there's nothing at the end of the tunnel for ya, there's certainly gonna be some frustration," Tortorella said. "But this falls on me. I'm not really interested in learning how to coach in this type of season, what 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 until we get to the end."
By Thursday morning, the Flyers made the decision that he wouldn't have to learn how.
“On behalf of the entire Flyers organization, we would like to thank John for his dedication over the past three seasons,” Flyers governor Dan Hilferty and president of hockey operations Keith Jones said in a joint statement. “We fully support Danny’s decision in making this change as he continues to do what is needed for the future of our organization. John Tortorella has made a positive impact throughout the Flyers organization, and we are grateful and appreciative of the opportunity to work with him. We wish John, Christine and their family all the best moving forward."
Now, Brière and the organization have to find the next coach to steer their rebuilding ship.
MORE: 5 candidates to consider as the next Flyers head coach
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