Tortorella needs to be flexible with approach or Flyers will stagnate

6 days ago  /  Broad Street Hockey  /  Read Time: 2 minutes 41 seconds

It is happening again.



The revolving door of Flyers players finding their way into John Tortorella’s doghouse and stapled to the bench in one of their games claimed its next victim last night, in the form of Cam York.



This isn’t to say that York didn’t have a difficult start to the game, because he certainly did — on the play leading up to the Leafs’ first goal, just over 10 minutes into the first period, York was stripped of the puck pretty handily behind the net, allowing it to be sent back out in front for the shot to be sent on goal, a shot which ultimately went in off of York’s skate — but he was far from the only player to make a big mistake across the course of this game, to have a play blow up on him in pretty catastrophic fashion.



JOHNNY TIES THINGS UP! pic.twitter.com/pgxEaJEUb2— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) March 25, 2025




To bench a player this early in the game — when the game is still only just tied, and they still looked like they might have some juice — particularly one who they’ve come to expect to play at least 20 minutes a night and be part of the rotation of players sent out in high-leverage defensive situations, does significantly hamstring the team, placing the rest of the already thin defense in a difficult situation. The Flyers’ problems last night were certainly bigger than just missing York for the majority of the game, but his absence (particularly as it spanned the whole game, and York didn’t end up one of the benchees that got a chance to redeem himself after a few shifts off, or after an intermission to reset) did also compound those problems.



When asked about the reasoning for the benching after the game, Tortorella declined to get into the details, but he did shoulder the blame for how this game went in the big picture, and seemed to try to reconcile his approach to coaching with the reality of their situation. “When you’re in this type of situation,” he said, “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. But this falls on me. I’m not really interested in learning how to coach this type, 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 the team prepared to play the proper way until we get to the end.”



Tortorella has been dogmatic this whole season — for his whole tenure, truly — that he won’t be changing the way he coaches this team or what his expectations are for the team on a process level, based on where they are in the standings, but perhaps this is the problem. The reality is that when the team is playing so shorthanded, with, as Tortorella said, nothing at the end of the tunnel, and mistakes are piling up, to single out one player to sit for close to the whole of a game begins to feel less like an exercise in teaching accountability than just picking on someone, than moving the goalposts for one player while others are allowed continued reps for making similar (if not worse) mistakes.



Of course, accountability matters and hard lessons need to be learned eventually, and this certainly isn’t to say that players should be coddled just because they’re out of the playoffs. But the axis of importance shifts when garbage time arrives, and with the clock running down on the season and chances to get learning reps in during actual game settings growing fewer, it’s becoming increasingly important for players to be given a longer lead to work through their mistakes on the fly, if the Flyers want these games to be meaningful developmentally.



Tortorella has been bullish about not changing his approach, and if that holds down the stretch, it could well prove as a hindrance to the team in the end. ...

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