The Philadelphia Flyers are reportedly moving on from John Tortorella as their head coach.
According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, Tortorella has “stepped down” as head coach, but that is all the information we have currently.
The Philadelphia Flyers are making a coaching change. Hearing that John Tortorella has stepped down.
— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) March 27, 2025
This comes just days after he had some controversial words following the brutal 7-2 loss to the Maple Leafs in Toronto.
“When you’re in this type of situation,” he said, “and you’re losing all the time and there’s nothing at the end of the tunnel for you, there’s certainly going to be some frustration. But this falls on me. I’m not really interested in learning how to coach this type, in this type of season, where we’re at right now, but I have to do a better job, so this falls on me, getting the team prepared to play the proper way until we get to the end.”
In addition, young defenseman Cam York was sat on the bench for 50 minutes of that game for not being as physical as he could be for a goal against that preceded the absolute avalanche of goals the Leafs ended up scoring in that game.
Of course, this was not uncommon for Tortorella to do for this entire season. Whether it was Morgan Frost, Joel Farabee, or controversially, Matvei Michkov, the veteran bench boss regularly held his younger players accountable to an extreme degree and either sat them for long stretches during the game or just had them as a healthy scratch. That was what most frustrated a whole section of Flyers fans and now it’s going to be interesting to see where the team goes from here.
The Flyers are moving in a new direction. Of course, it is not clear if this is a move to the front office — as many have speculated would eventually happen in Philadelphia for Tortorella — or a straight-forward firing and they will be looking for a brand-new coach as soon as possible.
This is an ongoing story. Stay tuned for updates.
UPDATE:
Not even minutes after the reports starting to come out, the Flyers made it official.
“Today I made the very difficult decision to move on from John as our head coach,” Flyers general manager Danny Briere said in a statement. “John played a vital role in our rebuild. He set a standard of play and re-established what it means to be a Philadelphia Flyer. John’s passion on the bench was only equaled by his charitable work in our community. As we move into the next chapter of this rebuild, I felt this was the best for our team to move forward. I’d like to thank John for his tireless work and commitment to the Flyers.”
The Flyers also announced that associate coach Brad Shaw has been named interim head coach and will assume duties immediately.
As we all speculated that Tortorella would stay with the organization, Briere’s statement and the language used — considering it was the Flyers themselves that “relieved John Tortorella of his duties as head coach” — it certainly is a firing and he will not stay with the Flyers.
The search for a new bench boss begins now.
