John Tortorella’s postgame press conference is always must-see viewing.

Most people think it’s because of Tortorella’s past, where he spars with the media or throws a player under the bus for not playing well, or verbally goes after an opposing coach with a comment that goes viral.

Heck, if you search “Tortorella press conference” on YouTube you’ll get a laundry list of the greatest hits in that regard.

And while those may be entertaining, and Torts knows they are, that’s not the must-see viewing part that I’m talking about.

No, instead, if you’re a fan of the team Tortorella is coaching, it’s in those precious few minutes that you get not just the raw emotion of a coach playing out in theatrical fashion, but rather you learn really going on with your favorite team – if you know what to look for.

Sometimes it’s subtle, and you have to mine for it, which, from my perspective, is part of the fun of my job. It’s like an extreme escape room – solve the Tortorella puzzle in under five minutes to get out of the press conference room alive.

But other times, Torts doesn’t let you play that game. He’s in your face about it. And following the Flyers’ 4-2 loss Thursday to Nashville – their first regulation loss since Nov. 28th – he said what he wanted to say right off the bat – and it wasn’t even answering the initial question.

The first question is about the flow of the game getting disrupted by a series of penalties in the second period – which it was – and we’ll get into the horrible officiating later – but that’s not what Torts wanted to talk about.

Nope. He gave a half-assed answer to that question, because it wasn’t the crux of the problem. And something that never sits well with Torts is when the media doesn’t ask the right questions.

He respects our jobs and what we have to do, but damnit, he wants us to know the game and ask the right questions.

So, when his team is playing well, win or lose, he wants us to ask about those things. And when his team is not playing well, we better know why, otherwise he’s going to be terse and/or gruff because we are wasting his time asking meaningless questions.

It’s a totally valid approach by Torts. He preaches accountability in all facets of the sport, from coaches, to players, to management so why the hell shouldn’t it fall on the media as well?

We have a job to do, fine. Then do it right.

I don’t want to turn this into an indictment of sports media, that’s another post for another time, but I simply wanted to set the stage for the message Torts wanted to get out there publicly – for fans to hear, but more importantly for his players to hear.

Because he knows the players are watching and reading everything. He knows it’s just another way to communicate to them. And when you do it publicly, well, the message just hits home a little stronger.

So there he was getting a first question he didn’t want to get, trying to sluff it off to get to that intended message.

“Ugly game,” Torts said, already annoyed. “Disjointed with penalties. Both teams had good minutes, both teams had bad minutes.”

Then, he switched off the topic and immediately got to the message he was trying to drive home.

“It comes down to the end as far as situational play,” he said. “We’re going to have to learn – and this is a part of our game that we’re going to have to get better at because we’ve turned our team around into more of a transition-type team and we’re going to have to forecheck sometimes. There’s no reason for us to turn the puck over with less than five minutes left. With the way they were stacking the neutral zone, they were more patient than we were and that’s what cost us the game at the end.”

So, Torts was using the play that led to Nashville’s game-winning goal as a microcosm of what he feels is the Flyers’ biggest concern at the moment. If you go back and watch it, it’s a play where Sean Walker tries to weave his way through traffic at the Nashville blue line, only to lose the puck. Cam Atkinson then loses a 50-50 battle for the puck with Philip Tomasino and it allows Nashville to transition in the other direction and for Tomasino to score the go-ahead marker.

The next question tried to find out if the forecheck issues were more in the offensive zone or if they were created further up ice. As it turns out, that writer was looking for an angle for the story he was eventually writing, which is something writers often do – have an idea what the story should be beforehand and then try to shoehorn comments into that narrative rather than let the conversation dictate that narrative afterwards. Hey, I’ve fallen into that trap myself. It’s easy to do. Create the story in your head first, gambling that what’s said afterwards fits like a glove.

Except Torts is the perpetual square peg for your journalistic round hole.

“Stubbornness,” was Torts’ response. He wasn’t going to answer that question with a response sponsored by Isotoner. “It’s stubbornness. Nashville checked. They gave us a clinic on checking. All of us talked about it all game long. ‘We have to get it in deep. We’re not getting through clean. They’re not opening up.’ We were holding on toward the end there. They had the better of the play during the third period. We were holding on, and we just can’t keep it simple. We have to keep trying to beat people. It’s basically a 1-on-4. It’s stubbornness. It’s a lesson we’re going to have to learn”

But he wasn’t done. No. He wanted to hammer home for us the same thing he has been hammering home to his players in-game. In practice. In video sessions, and it seemingly not getting through.

“This team is going to have to forecheck. When this league gets going – after Christmas, after the holiday – that’s when the grind starts coming in, if we think we’re going to be this high-flying, transition team, spreading and stretching and not forechecking, we’re in for a rude awakening. We found that out tonight.”

It’s what Chris Therien and I have been saying for some time now on Snow the Goalie – this style of play isn’t sustainable over 82 games in the NHL. The league changes how it plays in the second half of the season, and the Flyers will be beat into submission if they try to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s great that they’ve built themselves a nice cushion with a good record to start the season, but January and February are when the wheat and the chaff separate from each other.

Alas, Torts wasn’t done.

“We’re trying to remind them,” he said. “Sometimes it takes a little time to get it in their heads. I hope they learned their lesson pretty quick tonight, because that’s what cost us.”


I then asked Torts if this was something that was cropping up previously in games the Flyers were winning, and that this just reached a tipping point tonight, because of the outcome.

“Yes,” he said. “In January and February, you’re going to have to win games in different ways because it gets clamped down – and we can. We know how to forecheck. It just gets good to you, sometimes, a style of play, and you forget about the grind. We got checked into the ice tonight. I still think we handled ourselves well because it went back and forth and with all the penalties it’s really hard to get a read on the game, but when it comes down to it, late in the third period, it’s who blinks first, and we blinked a number of times and didn’t give ourselves a chance to win.”

Torts knows the time is coming to find out what the Flyers truly are. Are they the playoff contender they’ve started to make some believe they are, or are they just a speed horse who set a pace, only to get caught be thoroughbreds who know how to close in the end?

The next two months should be fascinating. Just listen to Torts after games, and you’ll know in which direction they are truly headed.

Officiating disaster

On Thursday, regular guest on Snow The Goalie’s Press Row Show and Flyers beat writer for The Athletic, Kevin Kurz, published an excellent story centered around Torts’ recent comments about NHL standing for “No Hit League.”

It’s an exhaustive report with several great interviews and really damning comments about what’s happened to the physical nature of hockey. It’s worth the read if you have a subscription.

The timing of that story couldn’t be any better, as there was a play in the game that fit the mold of it perfectly.

In the second period, Yakov Trenin was originally whistled for a two-minute minor for an illegal check to the head of Morgan Frost, on this play.


As you can see from the tweet, after looking at Morgan Frost’s mouth, and seeing a little blood, they changed it to a five-minute major for an illegal check to the head.

Of course, that creates a need for replay, to determine if the hit was worthy of a game misconduct as well. And after a lengthy review, it was determined that it was a game misconduct and Trenin would be banished for the night.

But, before kicking him out of the game, they needed to change the call, one last time, and called it a penalty for boarding and not for an illegal check to the head.

You know why?

Because they are bad officials, that’s why.

I was a little surprised because one of the officials was veteran ref Brian Pochmara. The other is 31-year-old Cody Beach, who is in his second season as an NHL ref.

His age and inexperience are important, as you will see in a few paragraphs.

First of all, they called the penalty for a check to the head, when Trenin never touched Frost’s head. Then, in what continues to be the dumbest thing in sports, the severity of the penalty is determined by whether or not blood is drawn. Never mind adjudicating the action – these refs adjudicate the outcome of the action. So, once they change it from a minor to a major, there’s no going backwards.

These officials put themselves in a precarious spot, because a major penalty requires an on-ice video review for the misconduct. They could have just made it a double-minor and went on with their day, but no, a major brings out the replay review.

Once they see the replay review, they realize, “Shit, we can’t call him for an illegal check to the head, because the original call was wrong, but let’s double down on this and call it boarding, and kick him out anyway to cover our asses.”

It’s asinine. The second angle shown in the video above, shows Trenin hit Frost square on the side, and not in the back. He doesn’t raise an elbow, and in fact keeps his arm in tight, and he doesn’t leave his feet to launch himself at Frost, just drives through him.

This is a textbook hockey hit. And yet… it’s a major penalty and a game misconduct – on the fourth iteration of the called penalty.

From Kurz’s story, with quotes from former NHL referee and current ESPN rules analyst Dave Jackson:

“What made it tough on the referees was players turning their back when they go to get hit, and they get projected forward violently into the boards. As a referee, you have to decide how much of it was the guy making the hit, and how much of it was the player turning his back, and was it unavoidable. Was the guy already committed to the hit when the player turned his back? Back in the day, guys knew they were going to get hit when they were being followed into the boards, and they’d do everything they could to prevent that hit.”

And as younger officials join the league, they’re more on the lookout for illegal checks to the head and hits from behind, because, like the players, they’re used to that sort of thing not being permissible under any circumstances.

“For newer officials that come in they have basically their whole career had the illegal check to the head rule,” Jackson said. “I think it becomes more second nature to them to be able to immediately pick up on that the head was contacted (or if) the head was the primary point of contact. But, it’s never an easy call, and it happens in a microsecond.”

Exactly. Frost puts himself in a vulnerable position because he’s not expecting to be hit like that. After the game he admitted to not knowing Trenin was coming. It’s a lack of awareness that is prevalent in the sport.

Also from Kurz’s story is this comment from former Flyers and St. Louis Blues coach Craig Berube:

“They’re going to just go in there and put themselves in vulnerable positions because they know they can,” Berube said. “There’s just not a lot of big contact anywhere anymore. There’s no fear or anything of getting hit in a position that you could get hurt.”

So what did Pochmara and Beach do after they botched this call? Well, they called two ticky-tack minors on the Flyers – a slash on Cam Atkinson that interrupted the five-minute power play, and an interference on Marc Staal that gave the Predators a two-minute power play of their own, all but evening everything out.

And the coups de grace – after calling seven penalties on both teams in the second period, mostly because they couldn’t get out of their own way officiating the game, they swallowed their whistles in the third period and called nothing.

How the hell are players supposed to play a game not knowing what the flow of the officiating is going to be? I mean were these two teams that sloppy in one period and that clean the next? Or do you have to look at how you called the game and see where you screwed up?

It’s definitely the latter. Frankly, it’s too often the latter. But the NHL will never clean up its own mess, and that’s a damn shame.