PHILADELPHIA – As the games dwindle and the Flyers experience another late-season swoon, coach John Tortorella said the ones he feels bad for are his players.
Unless there is a dramatic turnaround in the last 15 games, the Flyers will be on the outside looking in for a third straight season with Tortorella and five years overall.
Tortorella said his players have put a lot of work into this season but don’t have much to show for it. Last year there were encouraging signs as the Flyers held a playoff spot for 124 days before an April nosedive.
This time around the Flyers have stayed in the hunt but going into Thursday night’s home game against the Tampa Bay Lightning, a five-game losing streak has put thoughts of playoffs in jeopardy.
“You know what’s challenging for me?” Tortorella said before Thursday morning’s skate at the Flyers Training Center in Voorhees, N.J. “I feel bad for those guys. Especially for the guys who have been here for the three years I’ve been here.”
Quite a bit was expected of Tortorella when he was hired here before the 2022-23 season. He had won a Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning back in 2004 and also resurrected a franchise in Columbus.
While he’s done a decent job developing some of the Flyers’ prospects, it seems like there’s still a lot of work to be done.
“The guys that have gone through this for three years, they’ve done their work,” the coach said. “They’ve developed, they’ve hung together. This is the first time, of the past two years, it’s a tough hill to climb.”
Essentially the Flyers started to raise the white flag when they traded away Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee in February. One of the incoming players from that trade with Calgary, Andrei Kuzmenko, was traded away at the NHL deadline on March 7.
“I feel for them (the players) and my coaching staff,” Tortorella said. “(GM) Danny Briere, the whole organization. We want to get where we want to be.”
The ongoing rebuild has a lot to do with the lower expectations. The people upstairs know the trading of key players can have a negative effect on team performance.
“What happened at the deadline, all the players going (including Scott Laughton and Erik Johnson), I think it was the right thing,” Tortorella said. “The deadline was a seller’s market. I thought we did some great things there.
“But then we’re here (27-31-8 going into the Lightning game). It sucks. But we just have to keep our eye on the ball. I have to stay patient with stuff going through the last quarter of the year.”
Tortorella still wants to win games and that’s something that won’t change even if the Flyers are eliminated from playoff contention by early next month.
“I’m still going to teach,” he vowed. “There are going to be certain situations where there’s going to be accountability brought in. I’m still going to go about it that way. It’s hard though. Those are the guys it’s hard for. They see teams ramping up and that’s the greatest time of the year. It’s difficult to watch, so I really feel for them.”
