Speculation: John Tortorella To Be Let Go? (Mod warning post #238)

[arttk]

/sigh

The Coyotes' PP clicked at 19.9% this season, good for 4th overall. Last season, it was 14.8% (25th). The season before, it was 13.6% (29th).

It's getting easy to believe the talk about the team being hard to coach.

How bout we fire the guy that decided to put Burrows on the PP and leave Kassian off of it. Or having Hamhuis be the player in charge of missing the net in the backdoor play. Or taking Kesler away from his trigger position during a 5 on 3 and putting him in front of the net.

 

[Reverend Mayhem]

GM - "Sully you are fired"
Torts - "I am leaving too"
GM " I am not firing you, you can resign if you want"
Torts - "Do I get paid?"
Gm "no"
Torts - "never mind"

Probably how that conversation would go, but if you are canning one you might as well can the other. They are pretty much the same coach. At Sullivan's pressers this season all I heard was Torts' words with Sullivan's voice.

 

[arttk]

Probably how that conversation would go, but if you are canning one you might as well can the other. They are pretty much the same coach. At Sullivan's pressers this season all I heard was Torts' words with Sullivan's voice.

Yeah, I did say it really depends on what the priority is. I think Torts has proven that he is good at developing talent so it's not the end of the world to keep him to do just that. Plus he is more expensive to fire, just seem more realistic to keep him and replace his assistants. If he has a problem with it, just tell him, if we fire you, good luck getting a head coach job considering how you performed last season.

 

[Edo]

Ugh.


David Booth is not a 2nd liner by any stretch of the imagination.

Chris Higgins is if other guys are hurt, and you have no interest in winning a cup.

Chris Higgins is a terrible 3rd liner. He's a fine 2nd liner though.

 

[Edo]

In the traditional sense, you want scorers in a top 6 role, and bangers in the bottom 6.

Higgins clearly can score. Casting him in any other role would be poor player management. Just like thrusting Hansen into an offensive role.

 

[Addison Rae]

Higgins is versatile, tenacious responsible 2way player. Sound like a great 3rd liner to me.

 

[Reverend Mayhem]

I feel like people often overstate production and understate chemistry. Higgins to me is a second line player on a good team. Obviously you'd like to have a top-heavy top 6 so he is pushed to 3rd line minutes but that simply isn't the case for a great deal of team minus the elite teams like Chicago and Boston. But saying he's a 2nd liner on a bad team is bogus. Considering the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons we should know this.

He's not a line-driver by any stretch of the imagination but he's a great complementary piece on a lot of good teams for the second line. He's an absolute workhorse and can battle for the more skilled players down low.

 

[biturbo19]

High expectations, double embarrassed, two years running, go-to whipping boys Perron and Stewart already traded.

It might not be Hitchcock but chances are someone is going to take the heat for the Blues.

If the Blues do end up making significant changes, they're a much more fickle organization than i thought. You don't change a winning formula just because of a playoff series loss. The perennial contenders don't go scapegoating coaches and players, etc etc and deciding that they need to play a totally different style of hockey just because of one playoff series.

I think you might be laying it on a tad thick. The Stars added arguably a top 3 center in the league this year yet Ruff's team still managed only 2 extra wins over what Gulutzan's team was on pace for last season.

They were definitely an improved team, but Seguin was by far the biggest reason. This year outside of the Benn-Seguin line the team had a -43 goal differential. Last year the bottom 3 lines went -17 which would be -29 over a full season.

So you're not going to give Ruff any credit for Seguin blossoming into what he did this year? Seguin blew expectations out of the water this year, along with countless others on that Stars team. I think that's about as much a coincidence as nearly every single player on our own roster having one of the worst years of their careers all at the same time.

The other thing you're not looking at is what that roster is actually comprised of outside of Seguin and Benn. It's almost ridiculous that it ended up being a playoff roster. It's staffed with all manner of rookies and wildly inexperienced youth, depth journeymen, old washed up vets. Especially when you take a look at the back end.

So does this mean that you can forgive Torts for changing the style of the team when we suffered injuries?

I'm just saying that the judgement has to be the same for them both.

IMO, AV tightened the rains because he's always been a defensive style coach and he saw the opportunity to push his agenda. The Sedins were good point producers the year after. Gillis had added d-men who added to the blueline depth and Edler picked up Ehrhoff's slack. There are numerous holes in the argument that he got the most out of the roster the last two years.

My point has always been that AV shouldn't be painted as either devil or angel in these parts. Especially compared to Tortorella. Again, both did not do their jobs and neither should (have been)/be retained.

Torts has never changed his "style". It's the exact same ******** he ran in New York that got him turfed there. And it's the exact same thing he ran to start the year here...it's just not a sustainable style of play and banks on some unreasonable expectations of the roster at his disposal. And it fell off a cliff accordingly. He can pull his "my mistake was that i just didn't tell them to be aggressive enough" routine all he wants, but it means absolutely nothing. Has no basis in what he actually coached.

I think ruff has done very well with what he had... Especially on defence. Any coach that has Kevin cannauton taking regular shifts is a decent coach

Yeah. Seriously. Lindy Ruff took a roster to the playoffs with Kevin Connauton as a blueliner who played substantial games for them. Just look at the rest of their blueline too. There's no way a team with that motley assortment of defencemen should be outperforming a team with the talent and money we have invested in our defence.

Well, I think if there is one thing Torts did right it was how he managed the kids. Too bad he didn't manage the adults that well.

If the priority is to develop Horvat/Jensen/Kassian/#6overall/Shinkaruk next year, I wouldn't mind letting Torts stay as long as we fire Sullivan and maybe even Gulutzan and replace them with a coach that has actually coached a top ranked PP and a coach that can coach an up tempo system.

What exactly has Tortorella done to "develop" our young players that is so great? I didn't see that at all.

 

[vanuck]

What exactly has Tortorella done to "develop" our young players that is so great? I didn't see that at all.

He did help Kassian. It's been rehashed in the ZK thread but he improved his game by reducing his turnovers coming out of the zone i.e decision-making. Getting him to move his feet more in that part of the game, and to do so consistently overall. There's also a track record in New York.

 

[Wisp]

If the Blues do end up making significant changes, they're a much more fickle organization than i thought. You don't change a winning formula just because of a playoff series loss. The perennial contenders don't go scapegoating coaches and players, etc etc and deciding that they need to play a totally different style of hockey just because of one playoff series.

Just my take, but I've always felt the Blues were constantly tinkering and making changes every off-season and every deadline, even going to make changes they probably shouldn't have made. They've never struck me as a 'hold-the-line' organization.

Obviously this upcoming off-season will be telling.

 

[opendoor]

So you're not going to give Ruff any credit for Seguin blossoming into what he did this year? Seguin blew expectations out of the water this year, along with countless others on that Stars team. I think that's about as much a coincidence as nearly every single player on our own roster having one of the worst years of their careers all at the same time.

Not really. We're talking about a 21-22 year old player who put up 67 points at age 19. Is Tortorella responsible for Kassian and Tanev having the best years of their careers? No, it's just the natural progression of a young player.

The other thing you're not looking at is what that roster is actually comprised of outside of Seguin and Benn. It's almost ridiculous that it ended up being a playoff roster. It's staffed with all manner of rookies and wildly inexperienced youth, depth journeymen, old washed up vets. Especially when you take a look at the back end.

The roster was even worse last year and Gulutzan had them in a playoff spot with just over a week left in the season.

Dallas doesn't have a great roster, but when you have two elite young players in Seguin and Benn and a decent goalie, finishing 16th in the league and 3 points up on 21st isn't some Herculean task. Jack Capuano did the same thing last year by riding Tavares to the playoffs.

 

[LeftCoast]

Trevor - something's missing in this picture.

Hint.

 

[carolinacanuck]

this thread should be renamed to..

Speculation: John Tortorella to remain as coach?

 

[Fat Tony]

How bout we fire the guy that decided to put Burrows on the PP and leave Kassian off of it. Or having Hamhuis be the player in charge of missing the net in the backdoor play. Or taking Kesler away from his trigger position during a 5 on 3 and putting him in front of the net.

Just so you know, the /sigh was directed at the team.

 

[Archangel]

I am shocked he has not been fired yet

 

[arttk]

What exactly has Tortorella done to "develop" our young players that is so great? I didn't see that at all.

Kassian's game improved much more than when he was under AV. He seemed to know what his role was, what he needed to work on and we saw improvements over the course of the season. Under AV, we saw a confused Kassian and it seems like he was left to just figure it out himself.

Tanev got better but then his game was improving anyways so it's hard to tell. Jensen was handled appropriately I thought. Weber's game improved over the course of the season. Nothing happened for Schroder

If we look at the NYR, Kreider credits Torts for his development. Pretty much all the young guns were brought up by Torts.

 

[arttk]

Just so you know, the /sigh was directed at the team.

Yeah the team underperformed massively. I like Tort's honesty but man it's hard to defend the coaches when almost every single player had their career worst season under them.

 

[RobertKron]

Kassian's game improved much more than when he was under AV. He seemed to know what his role was, what he needed to work on and we saw improvements over the course of the season. Under AV, we saw a confused Kassian and it seems like he was left to just figure it out himself.

Tanev got better but then his game was improving anyways so it's hard to tell. Jensen was handled appropriately I thought. Weber's game improved over the course of the season. Nothing happened for Schroder

If we look at the NYR, Kreider credits Torts for his development. Pretty much all the young guns were brought up by Torts.

Dalpe improved as well. If we're going to count Sestito as a young player at 25, he improved significantly.

 

[biturbo19]

He did help Kassian. It's been rehashed in the ZK thread but he improved his game by reducing his turnovers coming out of the zone i.e decision-making. Getting him to move his feet more in that part of the game, and to do so consistently overall. There's also a track record in New York.

As far as Kassian goes, that's a fair point. Kassian did develop under Tortorella. But at the same time, i'm not going to give too much praise there...if Kassian is anything close to the player he is "supposed to be", it's just a natural progression of him figuring things out. And i don't necessarily thing it's a pure coincidence that Kassian started to really "figure it out" and play with some actual offensive confidence as the season reached the point at which is was pretty much a mail-in and it was made clear that the youngsters and rookies would be given a chance to show what they had.

Tortorella certainly instilled an important lesson in Kassian that if he isn't going to take care of the puck and move his feet, he's not going to play the minutes he wants. But it's hardly some unique feat for a coach to instill a defensive conscience in a player. And it's not as though the process is anywhere near complete...an entire year later. Torts largely just softened his stance on a lot of these things late in the year because the directive had come down from above.

Kassian's game improved much more than when he was under AV. He seemed to know what his role was, what he needed to work on and we saw improvements over the course of the season. Under AV, we saw a confused Kassian and it seems like he was left to just figure it out himself.

Tanev got better but then his game was improving anyways so it's hard to tell. Jensen was handled appropriately I thought. Weber's game improved over the course of the season. Nothing happened for Schroder

If we look at the NYR, Kreider credits Torts for his development. Pretty much all the young guns were brought up by Torts.

After all the **** people have spouted about "patience" with Kassian's game, i think it's more than a little big bogus to tout the fact that a year older Kassian improved more under Tortorella than AV. How do we even know that the seeds of a lesson planted under AV weren't the foundation of Kassian very slowly developing into a maybe good player very late in this season when the pressure was off?

Much the same question for Tanev...was his improvement this year not the projected and expected course for him this year no matter who the coach, based on the trajectory his development was on last year under a different coach? Is there really any reason to believe that Tanev wouldn't have continued to improve at a similar rate under the obvious example, AV...or in an even more extreme scenario, under a guy like Lindy Ruff who made KEVIN CONNAUTON into a regular NHL defender and still won game. Imagine what he'd do with a guy like Tanev...

Jensen was handled for almost the entirety of the year by a coach who ISN'T Tortorella. He came up once he was "getting it"...had some great games, and promptly fell into the case of doldrums effecting the rest of the team as his stay with the Big Club wore on. And you can pretty much trace it directly to the way his one "big gaff" with that typical rookie mistake trying to overhandle the puck on the blueline. It was basically all downhill from there...I don't call that "well managed".

And when we look to the NYR...is Kreider is the shining example and we're using the standards you're applying to the Canucks youngsters this year...why exactly is it that Kreider broke out as a legitimate impact player this year under the NEW coach AV?

Just my take, but I've always felt the Blues were constantly tinkering and making changes every off-season and every deadline, even going to make changes they probably shouldn't have made. They've never struck me as a 'hold-the-line' organization.

Obviously this upcoming off-season will be telling.

Maybe. I guess we'll see. But the patience they've shown for so many years in slowly and carefully assembling this current roster and finding the right coach show me that they're willing to "hold the line" to a fairly large extent. I think how the goaltending situation shakes out for them is going to be really interesting...but they're a team that has tended to want to hang on to its promising young talent and see what happens...up to the point they reach EJ levels of inadequate development at least.

Not really. We're talking about a 21-22 year old player who put up 67 points at age 19. Is Tortorella responsible for Kassian and Tanev having the best years of their careers? No, it's just the natural progression of a young player.



The roster was even worse last year and Gulutzan had them in a playoff spot with just over a week left in the season.

Dallas doesn't have a great roster, but when you have two elite young players in Seguin and Benn and a decent goalie, finishing 16th in the league and 3 points up on 21st isn't some Herculean task. Jack Capuano did the same thing last year by riding Tavares to the playoffs.

It's not as though Seguin wasn't coming off a down year and boatload of negative press when he was traded to the Stars. I didn't see many folks predicting he'd be one of the best scoring centers in the league this year. It was a tremendous gamble by Nill that paid off huge...but i still think a big part of that was installing a coach who was willing to work with what Seguin IS as a player, and not what they think he SHOULD BE. That "superstar Seguin" is still full of holes, at least as much as our very own Sedins. He's not even close to a complete player at this point...but Ruff managed to find ways to get Seguin and Benn into a position to blossom into one of the league's "best pairs" of forwards. Meanwhile, Tortorella took a pair of proven "best pairs" forwards and managed to turn them into...miserable failures.

Does anyone at all with their sanity intact think that a single team in the league would hire John Tortorella over Lindy Ruff right now if both were hypothetically available?

 

[biturbo19]

Dalpe improved as well. If we're going to count Sestito as a young player at 25, he improved significantly.

These are actually the two examples that stand out to me the most as players who legitimately improved beyond projections under Tortorella.

Dalpe managed to go from a castoff to a useful utility spare forward type player, and showed a really promising commitment and aptitude for the defensive side of the game. Tostitos showed better skating ability (though i'm pretty sure that has ZERO to do with Torts) which made him a more effective player this year in his specific limited role.

But if that's all we can offer up in that regard...that's pretty sad. Especially considering the entire slate of veteran players on this ENTIRE TEAM regressed under Tortorella to a significant extent. Like they got a LOT worse. Not just slightly...it was dramatic in almost every case.

 

[NickyFotiu]

Kassian's game improved much more than when he was under AV. He seemed to know what his role was, what he needed to work on and we saw improvements over the course of the season. Under AV, we saw a confused Kassian and it seems like he was left to just figure it out himself.

Tanev got better but then his game was improving anyways so it's hard to tell. Jensen was handled appropriately I thought. Weber's game improved over the course of the season. Nothing happened for Schroder

If we look at the NYR, Kreider credits Torts for his development. Pretty much all the young guns were brought up by Torts.

Kreider is a good polite kid who will not go negative when asked a direct question but he was treated pretty poorly last season. There was no love lost there on either side.

 

[fancouver]

Ideally:

Linden hires
Benning as GM

Benning hires
Trotz as Head Coach

 

[Scurr]

Ideally:

Linden hires
Benning as GM

Benning hires
Trotz as Head Coach

One thing I've learned following this team... we're probably not going to win... so the team may as well be entertaining. No thanks.

 

[fancouver]

One thing I've learned following this team... we're probably not going to win... so the team may as well be entertaining. No thanks.

huh
you dont like benning or trotz?

 

[Scurr]

huh
you dont like benning or trotz?

I don't like 1-0 hockey games... so I don't like either.