Due to his wife, The coach of the flyers has officially announced his retirement
The last time the Philadelphia Flyers were significant, much less in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, head coach John Tortorella and his seasoned assistants Michel Therrien and Mike Yeo were in charge of the team.
After struggling and going out of control for three full seasons, the Flyers have finally declared that a rebuild is necessary, albeit owing to a change in upper management.
John Tortorella, who spent 19 seasons as an NHL head coach, is expected to enjoy a successful retirement after retiring from head coaching earlier on Thursday.
John was the 21st head coach in franchise history, counting interim head coaches and excluding Bob McCammon’s second stint. On April 15, 2019, the Flyers officially announced that he had succeeded Scott Gordon and Dave Hakstol. He ended up staying through some of the most turbulent seasons in the recent history of the team, ending on December 6, 2021.
The Flyers had 20 head coaches in 53 years between 1967 and the day Vigneault was hired, with Fred Shero, Mike Keenan, and Dave Hakstol sharing the record for most games coached.
Shero spent 554 games as a bench warmer, Keenan 320, and Hakstol 277. Vigneault, who currently ranks 15th with 147 games coached, regrettably fell well short of any of the aforementioned coaches.
To his credit, he coached during both the COVID-shortened season of 2021 and the season that was interrupted by the virus in 19–20. With a record of 74-54-19 and a winning percentage of.568, he concluded his career ranked 11th all-time in franchise history, just behind Peter Laviolette and Roger Neilson and ahead of Dave Hakstol and Craig Berube.
Although John’s 16 games rank 10th on the list, he technically has the best playoff winning percentage in franchise history at.625 (10-6 record).
Chuck Fletcher prioritized experience over all else when it came to selecting his head coach, going in the exact opposite direction as his predecessor. When he was hired, Vigneault had completed 16 seasons, finished 12th all-time in wins (648), won the Jack Adams Award in 2007, and had won the President’s Trophy three times (in 2011–2012–2015). Most notably, as an experienced veteran, he played in 1,216 games, ranking 18th all-time.
Therrien and Yeo, two former head coaches with more expertise, were brought on as Vigneault’s assistants by the Flyers, who then decided to step it up a notch. Compared to Dave Hakstol and his assistants at the time, the Flyers now had 814 games of experience from Therrien’s head coaching days and 482 from Mike Yeo.
Chuck Fletcher was starting his first full season as general manager of the Flyers, who had added Kevin Hayes, Matt Niskanen, and Justin Braun to their core group of Claude Giroux, Jakub Voracek, Sean Couturier, Travis Konecny, Ivan Provorov, Shayne Gostisbehere, and Carter Hart. The Flyers had also recently hired a new coaching staff. They had a 22-15-6 record going into January 2020, with a +3 goal differential. However, they had just returned from a difficult road trip in which they had lost 5 of 6.
After they got back home, it seemed like everything clicked because, with a 19-6-1 record and a recent 9-game winning streak against the Boston Bruins on the last day of the season, they were the hottest team in the league going into the COVID pause.
The scoring was evenly distributed throughout the entire game, and young Carter Hart provided strong goaltending. It was some of the most dominant hockey the Flyers had played in a very long time.
The Flyers, along with Tampa Bay, Washington, and Boston, were paired in a round-robin tournament to determine the first-round seeding after nearly five months without hockey. The Flyers were among the top four teams in the conference going into the playoffs. The Flyers easily advanced, securing the top seed and a meeting with the Montreal Canadiens. They dominated all three games with relative ease, making it seem as though they didn’t stop moving from March to August.
But for some reason, the Flyers were a totally different team when they played the Canadiens and then the New York Islanders—like night and day. They struggled mightily in all areas of the game and lost 13-11, but they still defeated Montreal in 6 games.
They were outshot 178-149, outchanced in terms of Corsi For and Against by a margin of 331-232, and every game they won was incredibly close. If Hart hadn’t recorded back-to-back shutouts, who knows what might have happened? Their CF% and FF% were 41.2% and 42.1%, respectively.
They were up against the Islanders, a team that had been a constant source of frustration for them for years, and at the time, their survival was all that mattered.
After winning two straight overtime games to tie the series, the Flyers forced a seventh game, but the same issues that plagued them against the Canadiens continued against the Islanders. Despite being outmatched 24–16 and barely winning some games, they managed to force a seventh game. They lost the seventh game 4-0 after falling behind early and failing to rally. It was a disappointing match.
The fact that they went five months without hockey added to the possibility that the bubble was to blame, and the restrictions also didn’t help. Most teams let the past go, but the Flyers were thrilled with their development as they made it past the first round of the playoffs for the first time in ten years and appeared like a cohesive unit for the first time in a long time.
The Flyers had an 11-4-3 record going into the vital month of March, despite the 2020–21 season being shortened and the divisions being rearranged. They were once again not playing well but were making ends meet with opportunistic scoring.
They finished 6-10-1, were outscored 75-45, and had lost four straight games, including 9-0, 8-3, and 6-1 twice, before limping into April. They lost 10 of the 15 games in April, which didn’t make things any better. They hobbled into the end of the season, missing the playoffs and living under a cloud of on- and off-ice problems.
After running into a number of veterans, Vigneault made it clear that the Flyers’ management team had to pick a side—the players’ coaching staff. Fletcher opted for the former, and coincidentally, he took a series of snap decisions both before and during the draft that mirrored those thoughts.
In order to make it easier to complete a Rasmus Ristolainen trade, Ryan Ellis was brought in for Nolan Patrick and Phil Myers, Voracek was traded to Columbus for Cam Atkinson, and Shayne Gostisbehere was sent to Arizona as a cap dump.
