Kristen Shilton
The Philadelphia Flyers have fired coach John Tortorella as the team spirals toward missing the playoffs for the fifth straight season and one of the worst records in the Eastern Conference.
The Flyers announced Tortorella’s dismissal Thursday and said associate coach Brad Shaw would take over as interim head coach.
“Today I made the very difficult decision to move on from John as our head coach,” Flyers general manager Daniel Briere 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. … As we move into the next chapter of this rebuild, I felt this was the best for our team to move forward.”
Tortorella had one year and $4 million remaining on his contract.
He had coached the Flyers for the past three seasons, going 97-107-33 as Philadelphia was rebuilding throughout his tenure. His firing comes with Philadelphia on a six-game losing streak and having lost 11 of its past 12.
The change comes two days after the Flyers fell 7-2 to the Toronto Maple Leafs, putting Philadelphia’s record at 28-36-9, worst in the Metropolitan Division.
Tortorella, who won a Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2004, said after the game he was not “really interested in learning how to coach in this type of season, where we’re at right now.”
“But I have to do a better job,” he said. “So this falls on me, getting the team prepared to play the proper way until we get to the end.”
Shaw had joined the Flyers in July 2022 and coached under Tortorella with the Columbus Blue Jackets. He has also served as an assistant for the New York Islanders, Vancouver Canucks and St. Louis Blues. He previously served as an interim coach for the Islanders in 2005-06, going 18-18-4.
Shaw’s debut will come Thursday against the Montreal Canadiens.
The Flyers haven’t won the Stanley Cup since the last of their two straight championships in 1975. They last played in the Stanley Cup Final in 2010.
Briere championed the job Tortorella did last season as he guided the Flyers to the final game of the season with meaningful hockey to play. The Flyers were widely predicted by experts, fans and oddsmakers to finish near the bottom of the NHL.
The general manager preached patience over playoffs again this season, even with the ascension of rookie star Matvei Michkov, who has lived up to the hype with 51 points in 71 games. The 66-year-old Tortorella did come under scrutiny this season when he healthy scratched Michkov or benched him for long periods, explaining it was part of a tough-love approach toward the Russian’s development.
His résumé was about as good as it gets in the NHL when he was hired in October 2022: the Stanley Cup win with Tampa Bay; a conference final in 2012 with the New York Rangers; the master motivator who lifted the Blue Jackets from perennial losers before he was hired into four straight seasons in the playoffs.
The Flyers have been dragged down by years of poor drafting and inadequate talent evaluation and churned through six coaches in 10 years before Tortorella was hired. Briere, a former Flyers standout, was named general manager in spring 2023 and promised he would revamp the organization from top to bottom and boldly proclaimed the team was set for a rebuild — a term management had long loathed publicly using.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
