October has been a ‘roller coaster’ for John Tortorella and the Flyers

When John Tortorella coached his first Flyers game, on Oct. 13, time ceased to have relevance.

“Months run into one another,” Tortorella said. “I don’t even know what day it is half the time.”

With the Flyers’ 4-3 overtime loss to the visiting Carolina Hurricanes on Saturday, Tortorella completed his first month with his new team. But the coach was serious when he said he’s not looking at time that way.

“I mean it — I don’t know what day it is, usually, and it’s just getting ready for your next game,” Tortorella said before the game and then reemphasized it afterward.

It makes sense for a coach trying to break a whole team of an ingrained mentality. While the Flyers have an overarching goal — getting the players to play within the system and execute all the details — it’s not as simple as simply explaining the expectations and strategies to them.

A player might understand what he’s supposed to do, but in the heat of the moment when he’s moving at a high speed, he doesn’t have time to go through everything the coaches tell him. Muscle memory is more likely to take over, and that’s where the “bad habits” that Tortorella has been talking about come in. Repetition is the only way to break them.

“It’s going to take some time,” he said. “This is why I’ve said from Day 1 that we’re going to have to build this. And that’s going to be patience with us, as far as our coaching staff, and just to continue to teach.”

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That patience needs to extend beyond the coaches. It needs to be an “organizational philosophy,” Tortorella said. There’s going to be accountability, but that will be tempered by patience. General manager Chuck Fletcher seems to be on board with that, since, following the news that Sean Couturier underwent another back surgery, he said the organization will wait to see how things go before making any major moves.

“We’re still building,” Fletcher said. “Torts keeps bringing that up where we’ve integrated a lot of young players and some new players and we have new systems, new coaches. So I think right now, we’ll probably let things play out.”

Tortorella may not be keeping track of the time, but he knows, at this point, it’s still too early to judge. The results have been surprisingly good considering the “roller coaster” the team has been on, he said.

The Flyers are 5-2-1, with wins over the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Florida Panthers. In some of those wins, the team has looked “just terrible,” Tortorella said, while at times during the losses, it looked “really good.” Last season, the Flyers were also 5-2-1 eight games in and had wins over strong teams like the Edmonton Oilers and the Boston Bruins. They went 20-44-10 the rest of the way.

But early as it may be, there are still takeaways from the first month of the season, the biggest one being that this team has developed a resilience that wasn’t there last year. Amid the few wins the Flyers had last season, they never came back from a two-goal deficit. The Flyers have done it twice this season and almost completed a comeback in two other games. (They lost to Florida, 4-3, after tying it at 2, and they lost, 4-3, in overtime to the Hurricanes after going down by two.)

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Watching from his box, Fletcher has been pleased with his new coach’s progress, especially considering that the team is still without Couturier, Ryan Ellis, and Cam Atkinson, and just lost James van Riemsdyk for six weeks.

“His group has been resilient so far this year,” Fletcher said. “Torts has done a great job bringing some accountability. And I know the players are focused on what they’re doing, and they’re buying in. And we’ll just have to continue to push forward.”