Winners and Losers of Flyers Firing of John Tortorella

It was breaking news. But hardly surprising.

And if it did surprise you, chances are you haven't been paying attention.

John Tortorella was fired as head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday, ending a three-season run with a team that hasn't made the playoffs since 2020 and won't be prepping an itinerary this spring either.

It's the fourth time "Torts" has been fired by an NHL team aside from a six-season stint in Columbus that ended when he was not rehired at the end of a contract.

Five strikes...and you're out. Maybe.

The B/R hockey team got together to discuss Tortorella's termination and compiled a list of winners and losers in the immediate fallout of GM Daniel Briere's decision.

Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought in the app comments.

Winner: Flyers Players

Matthew Pearce/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

It's a hockey tale as old as time.

Or at least as old as midway through the 2000-01 season, when Tortorella landed his first full-time head coaching gig with the Tampa Bay Lightning.

He comes in full of fire and brimstone, establishes a culture focused on hard work and team play, and typically turns around teams previously foundering.

Tampa Bay went from 54 points before his arrival to Stanley Cup champions in his third full season. The New York Rangers missed the playoffs in year one and got to the Eastern Conference finals by year three. And Columbus produced one of the league's biggest playoff upsets–sweeping a 62-win Lightning team–amid a run of four postseason appearances in five years with him behind the bench.

But it doesn't work forever and it hadn't worked in Philly.

Tortorella was fired after six full seasons in Tampa Bay, four in New York, and one in Vancouver, right around the time his tactics started to wear thin, which probably means the locker room in Philadelphia will be a little bit looser down the stretch.

Not only were the Flyers just weeks away from a third playoff miss on his watch, but the season was full of stories of dissension in the ranks, including a heated scrape with prized rookie Matvei Michkov on the bench in January.

The coach rarely wins those exchanges.

And, in this case. the players won't miss him.

Loser: Tortorella

Katherine Gawlik/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

You've got to wonder if it'll ever work again.

Tortorella's fiery tactics suddenly seem out of place in an era when players make far more money and have contracts that guarantee more job security than the coach.

There's no denying that he made teams better in Tampa Bay, New York and Columbus before things went south, but it's equally true that he never fit in with the Canucks on the way to being dumped after one playoff miss in 2013-14.

And aside from a decent start to the 2023-24 season that went for naught thanks to a late collapse, he wasn't able to generate consistent success with the Flyers, who were eighth in the Metropolitan Division before his arrival and ticked only to seventh and sixth in years one and two before plunging back to eighth again.

The angst between him and Michkov was real. And he hadn't helped his cause in the locker room before that when he benched popular captain Sean Couturier.

Could it be different elsewhere? Perhaps.

But given his apparent reticence to suffer through prolonged growing pains before turning another competitive corner, as evidenced by comments after Tuesday's 7-2 loss to Toronto, let's just say it's difficult to envision.

Winner: Teams with Coach Needs

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

There will be NHL coaching openings this summer.

And, the last slide's content notwithstanding, there probably will be a team that at least tests the waters with Tortorella, whether or not it leads to a marriage.

Because he's been that good.

And because coaches with Stanley Cup chops, alongside authentic turnarounds of other woebegone franchises, don't stay on the unemployment line too long.

Several guys now standing behind benches across the league are not in their first stops, including this year's in-season hires Jim Montgomery (St. Louis) and Todd McLellan (Detroit). And there's always Peter Laviolette, now in his second season with the Rangers, who's been fired three times and not re-signed once since winning a title with Carolina in 2006.

Ironically, Tortorella's name is already the stuff of New York conjecture as Laviolette's prospects with an underachieving team seem less certain by the day.

Bottom line: If Tortorella is interested, he'll probably find a team interested in him.

Winner: Television Companies

Rich Lam/Getty Images

There's something about an ornery ex-coach or a cranky ex-player who's not at all shy about expressing an opinion, regardless of the stir it causes.

It's catnip for fans. Which means it's gold for television shows.

Don Cherry is far more memorable for his long run on Hockey Night in Canada than for anything he did in Boston or Colorado, and his blueprint has been followed in other sports by guys like Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Van Gundy and Buck Showalter.

Imagine, if you will, having Tortorella mic'd up with a producer in his earpiece giving him the green light to comment on officiating, on today's players, on the media.

On anything, for that matter.

It'd be amazing.

If you haven't seen his series of exchanges with Larry Brooks of the New York Post, for example, do yourself a social media favor.

Which means, if you're a TV executive, drop him alongside P.K. Subban or Mark Messier on ESPN, or between Paul Bissonnette and Henrik Lundqvist on TNT and watch the needle move.

Loser: Media

Jeff Vinnick/NHLI via Getty Images

This just in: Tortorella wasn't such a big fan of the media.

He was oft-times cantankerous and impatient, particularly when a reporter dared approach with a question after a loss or about a controversial topic.

Or perhaps just because he didn't like the person asking.

Again, we'll drop the name Larry Brooks in here for emphasis.

But that wasn't always such a bad thing.

Having a coach unafraid to let loose just as often results in gold for the folks carrying notebooks, and the now-ex-Flyers boss was trending toward a series of gems as the season screeched to the finish line and his frustration swelled.

The outburst in Toronto with nine games to go was just an appetizer to a main course that was sure to be tasty. Instead, unless interim stand-in Brad Shaw goes completely off the rails, it's far more likely to be a vanilla stretch drive.

Ho hum.