Philadelphia Flyers general manager Daniel Briere said differences of opinion with John Tortorella led to the coach’s firing Thursday.
“Torts is a complicated man. He’s a complicated coach. He’s a blast to work with because he challenges you. I truly believe he made me a better GM. He’s not a ‘yes’ man,” Briere said. “He had opinions and he’s earned the right to share his opinion. We listened to him. But we felt it was time to move in a different direction.”
Tortorella had one year and $4 million remaining on his contract. He was replaced by associate coach Brad Shaw on an interim basis. Shaw led the team Thursday night, when it beat Montreal, 6-4.
The decision was made by Briere, president of hockey operations Keith Jones and Comcast Spectacor CEO Dan Hilferty. Tortorella was hired in 2022 by Chuck Fletcher, Briere’s predecessor as general manager.
Philadelphia entered Thursday 28-36-9 on the season with the lowest points percentage (.445) in the Eastern Conference. The win against the Canadiens on Thursday night ended a six-game losing streak. Over three seasons in Philadelphia, Tortorella was 97-107-33 and failed to make the playoffs.
Briere said the urge to make a coaching change had only occurred to him recently.
“It’s pretty new. It really got serious in the last few days,” he said.
Those losses included a crushing 7-2 defeat to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Tuesday. Tortorella shocked many after that game when he said that he was not “really interested in learning how to coach in this type of season, where we’re at right now.”
Briere acknowledged those comments were “one of the things that have happened along the way” that led to Tortorella being fired. “It’s a series of things that have happened. Probably a little bit more in the last three weeks. [It] escalated since right after the trade deadline. It’s an accumulation,” he said.
Briere admitted that the Flyers’ rebuild took its toll on Tortorella, who watched the team trade players like forwards Joel Farabee, Morgan Frost, Scott Laughton and Andrei Kuzmenko in the last two months.
“The reality is we’ve made some tough trades that we feel are going to set us up for the future, but in the present time put us at a disadvantage. He understood that was part of the plan,” he said.
Laughton, who was traded to the Maple Leafs before the deadline, was stunned by the firing.
“I think it was a shock honestly. Who knows what would have happened in the summer and everything like that?” Laughton said before their game in San Jose on Thursday.
Briere praised the way Tortorella worked with the team’s younger players, despite his trademark “tough love” that saw many of them benched or scratched during the season. He singled out the way Tortorella worked with prized rookie Matvei Michkov, saying he did a “tremendous job” trying to improve the forward’s game.
“Every time he was challenged, his competitiveness just rose to the top,” he said of Michkov.
Briere said he hasn’t started compiling a list of potential new head coaches. He hopes whoever takes over will experience an upswing for the Flyers in the standings.
“I feel at this time it’s rock bottom,” he said. “I knew in my guts that we were still going to go through at least another tough year. We knew that there’s a good chance we would take a step back and unfortunately it happened.”
