Over a month ago, the Philadelphia Flyers fired head coach John Tortorella with just nine games left on the season. The team had enough of what he brings to an NHL team and decided to not even finish his third season as the Flyers’ bench boss.
Since then, it’s been asking the question of who general manager Danny Briere and president of hockey operations Keith Jones will be hiring to replace Tortorella. Several candidates have come to the front of every single Flyers fan and out the mouth of some national media members. Maybe it’s the Jones’s Western Michigan connection with Pat Ferschweiler that will get him the job, or they can shoot big and send a boatload of Comcast’s cash to Denver for David Carle. But there is one name that has been consistent ever since the job opened up: Rick Tocchet.
Whether it’s the 621 games he played for Philadelphia, or the Torts-esque approach to the game and the team wants to continue forming this young roster in that image, the noise connecting the Flyers to Tocchet has been overwhelming.
While it has been vague connections for the most part, on Wednesday’s episode of “32 Thoughts: The Podcast“, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman said something a little more concrete.
“It wasn’t, like I said, an absolute top-level bombshell, but it was a very, very fair offer for where Tocchet deserves to be,” Friedman said. “You know, I think now a lot of people are going to look at Philadelphia. I do think the Flyers have interest. We’ll see what happens, but I do think Tocchet is going to have some options, so he’ll decide what he wants to do.”
Now, Friedman could just be doing more hypothesizing. But until now, the phrasing of Tocchet-to-Philadelphia has been more about what the individual media member thinks and how they could see it happening because of the obvious reasons (Flyers love to hire former Flyers). There hasn’t been anyone of note plainly saying that they think the Flyers have real interest in hiring the former Canucks coach. It has just been vague pondering and assumptions.
While they would have had to wait until July 1 to really talk with Tocchet and potentially hire him, with the Canucks announcement of them parting ways, you have to think that they could do it as soon as right this very minute if they wanted to. According to reports, though, the Flyers have not started the real work of their coaching search and we shouldn’t expect anything to happen soon.
Would this be a good move for the Flyers, with where they are at now in the rebuild? No one truly knows for sure. The Canucks were a fairly good team under his ruling outside of being decimated by injuries this season and having an internal spat between their two star forwards that exploded into being the main story in the sport for months. Maybe, we just need to throw out that 2024-25 season as an example of what Tocchet could bring to Philadelphia.
Hockey people love him and think he is a great coach — that’s all we keep hearing. Maybe it will just take the right team and mix of players to elevate him and he can bring the Flyers to the actual playoffs sooner rather than later.
This is all cope. It’s so classic Flyers to hire a former player to be the head coach during extremely important seasons for the future of this team.
