John Tortorella on rest of Flyers season: ‘It sucks’
The Philadelphia Flyers were one of the few teams that managed to trade away multiple players before the trade deadline last week. Scott Laughton to Toronto, Andrei Kuzmenko to Los Angeles, Erik Johnson to Colorado, and before that both Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost to Calgary. Five regular roster players subtracted from this lineup.
And now, the Flyers have 16 games left in the regular season and they are certainly not making any push for the playoffs whatsoever. While there are some reasons to stay tuned in and pay attention to this team, it is also understandable if people start to tune out and wait until the NHL playoffs start to watch some good hockey being played, or even until the 2025 NHL Draft in a few months to see what the future of this team is like.
After practice on Thursday, before the Flyers host the Tampa Bay Lightning, head coach John Tortorella reflected on the deadline and the situation this team is in for the remainder of the season.
“The deadline was a seller’s market, I thought Danny did some great things there,” Tortorella said Thursday morning. “Then we’re here. It sucks. But we just have to keep our eye on the ball, I have to stay patient as far as some of the things that we’re probably going to go through here in the last quarter of the year, evaluate, but also try to win.
“I’m still going to teach, there are going to be certain situations that there’s going to be accountability brought in. Every day there’s accountability. I’m still going to go about it that way.”
Evaluation really is all that is left. There are some young players who are going to be aiming to improve and make a larger impact next season, and then there are situational evaluations to do, like who is capable of doing anything at all on this power play.
But what about the players who know who they are in the NHL and we know what they can do? There’s no real evaluation to perform on Travis Konecny or Owen Tippett. So, where do they go from here and do with the rest of their seasons? Their head coach has some sympathy.
“You know what’s challenging for me, I feel bad for those guys,” Tortorella continued. “I feel for my team. Especially the guys that have been here for the three years — I’m speaking for my years being here — the guys that have gone through this for three years.
“They’ve done their work, they’ve pushed, I think guys have developed, they’ve hung together, they’ve stuck together. This is the first time, at least in the last two years, that it’s a tough hill to climb. So I feel for them and I feel for my coaching staff, Danny Briere, the whole organization. We want to get where we want to be.”
The past seasons under Tortorella have been adventurous or at least had more purpose in the final month of the campaign. During the 2022-23 season, the Flyers completely bottomed out. Winning just nine of their final 29 games, the Flyers sunk in the standings — but they weren’t supposed to be good anyways. It was all about a transition period as the first full season without Claude Giroux and then they just completely fell off a cliff. Last year, they made the heralded improvement. Right up until the final days of the regular season they were pushing for the playoffs and without a disaster in between the pipes, they would have made it there.
Now, they sold off some longtime members of this team and are just floundering, waiting for more talent to be brought in eventually. We can certainly see why Tortorella finds this a much more miserable experience than the previous two finishes.
Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, it ends quick and painless and we can move on thinking about prospects, paying attention to a more exciting Lehigh Valley Phantoms team, and the upcoming summer that should be filled with more hope for the future. Right now, on NHL ice, it’s nothing pretty to look at.
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