Method to the madness: Inside John Tortorella’s plan to rebuild the Flyers

At the end of a period or a game at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, there were two paths from the bench for then-Columbus Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella to take — turn left and debrief in the coaches’ offices, or turn right and address the players in the locker room.

Contrary to the popular, confrontational perception of him, Tortorella wasn’t always a turn-right guy, according to assistant coach Brad Shaw. After a particularly bad period or game, Shaw took one step toward the locker room assuming that Tortorella would have something to say to the players, only to watch the coach veer left and let them mull over their shortcomings among themselves.

The first intermission of Game 1 at a record-setting Tampa Bay Lightning team in the first round of the playoffs on April 10, 2019, however, was not one of those turn-left instances.

The Blue Jackets had fallen behind, 3-0, prompting Tortorella to deliver his now infamous locker room pep talk that television cameras captured. To the public, the captivating nature of the speech took root in the bleeped-out F-bombs and his passionate, rising tone. But the players in the room, including winger Josh Anderson, resonated with a theme they became familiar with upon Tortorella’s arrival during the 2015-16 season: Forget about skills. Forget about X’s and O’s. It’s a [expletive] mindset of [expletive] believing.

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“Any time we played one of the top teams, whether it was Pittsburgh, or Washington, or Tampa, he didn’t really care what they did during the year,” Anderson said. “He didn’t care what firepower they had, either [Alexander] Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, [Steven] Stamkos, [Nikita] Kucherov, he knew the team that we had in that locker room. Anybody can play with anybody out there and he just wanted everybody to be on the same page and go to war.”

Columbus rallied to a comeback Game 1 win and a shocking 4-0 sweep of the Lightning, earning them their first playoff series victory in franchise history. Early in his six-season tenure with the Blue Jackets, Tortorella worked to bring together a group of individuals who, on paper, paled in skill compared with that of other teams. He provided the foundation for that belief with an emphasis on work ethic. But the foundation would have sunk without the players’ buy-in.

Now, the 64-year-old Tortorella is invoking a similar message with Flyers, looking to inspire belief within another underdog team that lacked belief and success the last two seasons. Whether or not it works in Philadelphia, as it did in Tampa Bay, New York, and Columbus, will rely heavily on the players’ response, but everything starts with Tortorella.

“We eat in the garden,” Shaw, now an assistant under Tortorella with the Flyers, said. “Weeds pop up. It’d be nice to be sunshine and cupcakes and birthday parties. That’s not an NHL season. There are bumps in the road, and there are going to be things that need to be ironed out. You have to deal with those the right way. That’s part of the challenge. And for me, I get to stay positive, because I know who’s at the helm, because I know he can do it. I know he’s already done it.”

Seven straight losses into the Blue Jackets’ 2015-2016 season, the optimistic feeling winger Scott Hartnell once held about the team dissipated.

The Blue Jackets under coach Todd Richards had finished the previous season 42-35-5, and looked to be headed in the right direction. Seven losses later, and Blue Jackets general manager Jarmo Kekäläinen fired Richards on Oct. 21, 2015, replacing him with Tortorella.

With a new coach came a new standard, and a rude awakening for some.

“No one cheats each other,” Hartnell said. “Right off the bat, there was a guy or two that skipped a workout after a game and it was like World War III happened in the dressing room.”

Like any new coach, Tortorella had a system to implement, but he was dealing with a young and relatively inexperienced team. The overriding principles he set forth, however, held greater significance than the structure — the team is more important than any individual, and work ethic is non-negotiable. Columbus’ players weren’t the most skilled, but they were going to be the best-conditioned team.

Tortorella spent the rest of the season getting to know his players’ strengths and weaknesses. He also noticed who bought in and who didn’t, who needed some prodding, and who was too checked out to keep around. On Jan. 6, 2016, 31 games into Tortorella’s tenure, the Blue Jackets traded their top young center, Ryan Johansen, to the Nashville Predators in exchange for defenseman Seth Jones.

“That’s a really important part of coaching, when you’re building, it’s addition by subtraction sometimes,” Tortorella, who has coached the Lightning, Rangers, Vancouver Canucks, and Blue Jackets, said. “That happened in Columbus. And I think it’ll happen here.”

The way Tortorella coaches differs from what “today’s athlete” is used to. According to Shaw, the current generation of players has been told where to be and what to do at every level. Tortorella prefers not to spoon-feed, requiring players to learn how to self-assess and ask questions to improve their games.

But for some of Columbus’ eventual top players, that ability to self-assess didn’t come immediately. Tortorella benched Jones for wading into games too hesitantly, a characteristic he sees sometimes in Flyers defensive prospect Cam York. He also questioned Nick Foligno’s merit for the captaincy heading into the offseason, threatening to take his letter away if he didn’t improve.

“I think one of the greatest things he does is he doesn’t paint the whole picture,” Shaw said. “Guys have to invest if they want to get the full picture. They have to paint some of it themselves. I think that process really gets guys down the path of getting to where they are at their best.”

Before he started coaching the Blue Jackets’ defense and penalty kill ahead of the 2016-17 season, Shaw happened to watch the team’s 5-1 road loss to the Nashville Predators in March 2016.

The Predators outshot the Blue Jackets, 48-19, but what concerned Shaw most was that the team’s investment without the puck wasn’t on the same level as their investment with the puck. The best teams in the league — the Lightning when they were winning their Cups, he used as an example — check to ensure they stay on the attack more often than they defend.

“I think when you can make every inch of ice hard to work for, you give yourself a chance every night, no matter what your offensive abilities are,” Shaw said. “Because you’re going to frustrate the other team. And you’re going to have that sort of description by other teams that you’re really hard to play against. Torts I’m not sure has ever had a team that other coaches or teams didn’t say that about his group.”

To make up for the group’s lack of offensive skill, the Blue Jackets focused on skating harder on the backcheck (or “reload,” as Tortorella calls it), being more decisive in their checking to blow up plays, and gathering loose pucks and generating goals out of them. In turn, Shaw and Tortorella helped the Blue Jackets go from 29th in the league among 30 teams in goals against (252) to second (195).

It didn’t hurt to have goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky post a .931 save percentage and a 2.06 goals against average, earning his second Vezina Trophy. The Blue Jackets also boasted two of the best young defensemen in the league in Jones and Zach Werenski, who each blossomed in Tortorella’s first full season.

But the young Blue Jackets still relied upon a committee, with 12 players notching 10 or more goals that season. Shaw asserted that the Blue Jackets’ fourth line of Hartnell, Sam Gagner, and Lukáš Sedlák (which combined for 27 goals) was among the best in the NHL and allowed Tortorella to roll all four lines in each game.

Cam Atkinson, then 27, led the team in scoring with 62 points (35 goals, 27 assists), followed by 22-year-old Alexander Wennberg with 59 points, and 24-year-old Brandon Saad with 53 points. Tortorella watched Foligno transform his leadership and his game, finishing fourth on the team with 51 points.

“I think the more that we played a certain role together, and everybody knew their role individually, I think it became harder to play against us,” Anderson said. “And then we finally got noticed playing against top teams.”

The Blue Jackets set several franchise records that season, including a 16-game win streak (the second-longest in NHL history) from Nov. 29, 2016, to Jan. 3, 2017. Earlier in the season, they scored a franchise-high 10 goals in a shutout win over the Montreal Canadiens. At a certain point, Tortorella and his assistants were just coaching for puck possession, but “the thing still goes in the net,” Shaw recalled.

They finished 50-24-8 and returned to the playoffs for the first time since the 2013-14 season. Prior to Tortorella’s arrival, the Blue Jackets had made the playoffs just twice. Tortorella’s teams reached the postseason in four of his five full seasons as head coach, highlighted by the sweep of the Lightning in 2019.

“We basically took the hockey world and flipped it on its head,” Shaw said. “And that is such a rarity at this level. You just never get to do that. You don’t. And that was a real tribute to him sort of leading the way and then the players embracing it and doing it.”

When general manager Chuck Fletcher announced the Flyers’ opening-night roster on Tuesday, the list consisted of 12 players ages 25 and younger, including the likes of Joel Farabee, Noah Cates, and Morgan Frost.

That youth reminds Tortorella of his teams in Columbus, where he focused on developing the organization’s drafted players, including Werenski, Anderson, and forward Oliver Bjorkstrand to succeed in the salary-cap era. Once Tortorella felt like the foundation was set going into the 2017-18 season, the Blue Jackets added a budding superstar in Artemi Panarin.

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“I think that’s down the road for us here,” Tortorella said. “I think that’s going to be very similar, too, but I don’t think right now. I think we have enough to do in developing our own guys and our own foundation.”

For now, Tortorella is focused inward, preparing both the young, unproven players and the underperforming veterans for the season ahead. He joked during camp about “spoon-feeding” information to players. As the season gets underway, the training wheels will come off, and the players will have to start painting the picture for themselves.

Tortorella’s tiring training camp complete with arduous skating tests and high-tempo drills has paid early dividends for his squad. The Flyers are 2-0 to open the season, and while they may not be playing to perfection, they’ve shown a strong work ethic and a sense of resiliency when momentum starts to slip.

“We don’t have a lot of big names, it’s not a terribly skilled team,” Tortorella said. “We’ve got some good players. We’re going to have to do it as a team and that means a belief in how we back one another up.”

For the Flyers, success starts with belief, just as Tortorella once reminded the Blue Jackets players in his 2019 locker room speech. The Blue Jackets bought in and reaped the benefits. Now, it’s on the Flyers players to do the same.