March 28, 2025
Eric Hartline/Imagn Images
Brad Shaw will coach the Flyers down the final stretch of the season.
The Flyers skated like a team with a weight off their shoulders.
Sean Couturier scored twice, and on the power play (finally) for the latter, with a look up to the ceiling and a sigh of relief as the horn blared.
Matvei Michkov scored twice, too, staying aggressive after the puck all night, and then left with an empty-net chance at the hat trick that the team went out of their way to try and feed him late. But he rang the shot off the post as he fell into the corner in disbelief, and maybe a bit of rage. All his teammates and interim coach Brad Shaw could do was throw their arms up and laugh.
But the key there was that they could.
Matvei Michkov was so mad he missed the empty netter he went down the tunnel and had to come back out😂😂#Flyers pic.twitter.com/e8hAq6hTy5
— Flyers Nation (@FlyersNation) March 28, 2025
The Flyers beat the Wild Card-pursuing Montreal Canadiens, 6-4, at the Wells Fargo Center on Thursday night, and all in the face of the day's major story that enveloped them.
John Tortorella had been fired as the team's head coach after just shy of three seasons and with nine games left heading into Thursday night.
The team was stripped down at the trade deadline several weeks ago and was expected to struggle the rest of the way as a result, but even with that in mind, they were spiraling.
They were on a run of six straight losses, a winless five-game road trip, and an abysmal 1-10-1 stretch going back further through their last 12 games.
But things appeared to have reached a breaking point with Tuesday night's 7-2 embarrassment in Toronto.
The players looked despondent, Cam York was benched for the entire game after the Maple Leafs scored their first goal, and postgame, Tortorella delivered the damning quote that he wasn't "interested in learning how to coach in this type of season."
It's clear now that there was no coming back from that.
The Flyers made the announcement Thursday morning that Tortorella was out and that Brad Shaw would be taking over as the interim coach for the remainder of the schedule. General manager Danny Brière discussed the decision to move on from Tortorella with the media before the game, and the players were finally available to speak on it after.
"Mixed emotions" came up a lot, but so did a prevailing message that ran counter to what Tortorella said a couple of nights prior, that "there's nothing at the end of the tunnel for ya": Stick together, and play for one another.
"If you don't feel like you're up to it, and you feel you don't like you wanna play tonight, think about the guy next to you," Brière said during his press conference of what he told the team earlier in the day. "He might be up for a contract, he might be trying to save his job just to finish the year in the NHL."
"We all have something to play for," echoed bruiser Nic Deslauriers postgame, who scored for the first time all season Thursday night in only his 24th game of it. "If it's not just for yourself, it's for the guy beside you."
And amid chaos, weeks of frustrating results, and now a marked turning point for the direction of the team, the players on the ice all skated after a chance to breathe, and laugh – even if only for a second.
A few other thoughts on where the Flyers are headed...
Brière sat down at the dais in the Wells Fargo Center's media room, and knew that the questions were coming of whether Tortorella's comments from Tuesday night were tied to his firing.
They were, the GM admitted, but the call to move on wasn't fueled by that complete mess from leaving Toronto alone.
The cause for the split really started brewing with the trade deadline.
"I felt it was time, and you know, you're gonna ask me 'Is there one thing that happened?' It's not one thing," Brière said. "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, right after that.
"So, like I said, it's not one thing, specific. It's an accumulation that have happened, probably more often lately."
And you can take your pick from what built into a pretty extensive list of polarizing decisions, for better or worse – another Michkov benching, scratchings of York and then the defenseman's Toronto benching that ended up carrying over into the Montreal game on Thursday night (Shaw said there was a disciplinary issue there and left it at that), and questionable usages for a team that needed to evaluate rather than to solely compete.
But that was all just post-trade deadline, after Joel Farabee, Morgan Frost, and Scott Laughton were all shipped out, which made the team notably worse in the immediate term.
The list does run longer going further back through Tortorella's tenure, and specifically to when Brière took over full-time as the GM last year.
To that point, Brière did say something slight but eyebrow-raising...
Brière kept his press conference highly diplomatic.
He opened with a prepared statement thanking Tortorella for his time and effort into setting a standard for the team, and was sure to never throw anyone under the bus as he answered questions.
But there was one question that called back to when the Flyers were in the midst of a surprise playoff push last season. Brière was asked whether there were any decisions Tortorella made that concerned him then, or that he was worried would possibly be repeated again.
"That's a good question," Brière said of it. "Yeah, there's things that happen that leave scars. It's just the real world. It affects certain players more than others maybe a little bit...I don't know to which degree, but there's certain things, obviously, that you keep an eye out and watch for that have happened in the past."
If you'll remember for a minute, one of the decisions, and a massive gamble, that Tortorella made late in the run last season was to scratch Sean Couturier not all that long after naming him captain.
Couturier definitely didn't appreciate it at the time, the move at best only offered a brief pause from the team stalling out, and while it might be purely coincidental...Couturier did just have a two-goal game the day Tortorella was fired.
As Brière alluded to at the top of his press conference, there was no one thing that led to Tortorella's firing. The reasons piled up.
Shipping longtime vets and more immediately helpful players at the deadline without replacements, all the losing that quickly followed, and then the firing of Tortorella thursday morning, Brière said he hopes that this is "rock bottom."
The past few weeks have been tough on the entire team, he explained, but the future is still lining up.
"I have the feeling that moving forward now, it's gonna start to get better," Brière said. "It's not going to be an overnight thing. It's gonna take time, but I feel we're stepping into a different phase of the rebuild."
It just needs its next voice behind the bench now.
Brière said the Flyers "aren't there yet" in starting the full search for their next coach.
They're not looking into the market yet, nor do they have a list of possible candidates.
Shaw is getting this team to the finish line, and first the organization wants to ensure that they reach it in as good a shape as possible – you know, relative to where they're at.
That means this final stretch is going to serve as a bit of an audition for Shaw, but as for what the Flyers are going to be looking for over these next couple of months or so...
"I'm not sure exactly what we're going to be looking for as a coach,"Brière said. "One thing I can tell you is: We have a young team. A coach that can teach is going to be important to start with, but as far as all the traits, I think it's a little too early to really dive deep into that."
For right now, David Carle at Denver University is the top name on a ton of coaching candidate lists as a star on the rise, but you can see a few more names who could come into play HERE.
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