The Vegas Golden Knights hired John Tortorella and that seems crazy (but also potentially hilarious)

This is insane, right? This is insane.

There is only one team in the NHL that is crazy enough to fire their head coach with eight games remaining in the regular season (when they are already playoff bound!) and hire John Tortorella. That team is, quite obviously, the Vegas Golden Knights, and that is precisely what they did on Sunday when they fired Bruce Cassidy and brought in Tortorella for the rest of the season.

It was one of those announcements that made you check the source of it multiple times to make sure you were not getting trolled.

It seems insane. It probably is insane. I am not sure if it is what this particular Golden Knights team needs. It is also exactly how the Golden Knights operate. There is not a more ruthless, cutthroat team in the NHL, and they will do anything, dump anybody, hire anybody, trade anybody and sign anybody if they feel it gives them a better chance to win.

Sometimes there is a lot to be said for that. Maybe some teams need to be a little more ruthless and a little less loyal. The results speak for themselves. They are the most successful expansion team in modern sports history across all of the major North American men’s sports leagues, and one of the most successful teams in the league overall since they began play during the 2017-18 season. This is their ninth season in the NHL. They are going to the playoffs for the eighth time, they have been in the Western Conference Finals four times, the Stanley Cup Final two times and won it all (with Cassidy!) four years ago. It is a bottom-line business, and they achieve the bottom-line goal pretty consistently.

Sometimes it makes them look like a shitty organization, run by shitty people, and an easy organization to hate for the way they treat people that have won for them, and for the type of people they are willing to roll the dice on. They do not care about optics. They have never cared about optics. They probably never will as long as it gets them closer to their bottom-line goal.

But are they flying a little too close to the sun with this one from a hockey perspective?

There is some precedent for a move like this, but it is limited. Back in 2000 the New Jersey Devils, a playoff-bound team and legitimate Stanley Cup contender, fired head coach Robbie Ftorek (he of the bench-throwing fame) and replaced him with Larry Robinson with eight games remaining in the regular season. That move was made by then-general manager Lou Lamoriello, who quite honestly ran his Devils teams the way this Golden Knights team is run. It is actually surprising he does not work for them given how similar they are.

That move ended up producing a Stanley Cup win. Vegas is obviously hoping for that sort of result.

On one hand, this is probably not going hurt them or make things worse. It has already been an underachieving team all season and it clearly needs a spark. But is this it? Is this the thing that turns the season around?

There is not a more polarizing coach in the NHL than Tortorella. He is demanding. He brings accountability. He is not afraid to publicly call out his players (and also praise them). That is the nice way and coach-speak of way of saying he can be a gigantic asshole. That works for some people. It does not work for others. I know for a fact there are players in the NHL that absolutely love playing for him and will run through a wall for him. I also know for a fact there are players in the NHL that would prefer to put him through the wall.

He has no time for the media or their questions, and usually treats the people asking the questions (as well as their questions in general) with the same level of respect you treat the neighbor whose dog keeps shitting in your yard. I have always suspected this is more schtick than anything else. He might hate having to answer our questions, but if everybody is talking about what he said, and what he did, then they are not focussing on the players. It is not always a case of him putting up a shield for his players, but I do think that is the case a lot of the time.

Overall, I think the league is more entertaining and funnier when he is in it. Sports needs cartoon-ish villains sometimes, and you honestly never know what he is going to do next. He might charge into the other team’s locker room between periods. He might yell about something and throw a temper tantrum. The work he is going to do on the referees in a best-of-seven playoff series against Connor McDavid is going to be legendary.

But all of this is just narrative and does not get to the overall point of, “is this guy the right guy this Vegas Golden Knights team?”

For whatever criticisms you might have of Tortorella and his coaching style (and they are all valid), I do not think he is an overall bad coach. There is a place for him, and a certain type of team he can do well with. At this stage of his career he is probably best suited for an under-manned, under-talented team that needs to maximize what it has to earn every possible point that it can. He seems to do better with those teams than the super-talented, high-expectation teams. I think that is why his tenure with, say, the Columbus Blue Jackets was viewed in a more favorable light than his tenures with the New York Rangers and certainly the Vancouver Canucks.

I think he got everything he could have out of those Philadelphia Flyers teams.

But is this Vegas team that sort of team? More importantly, can he overcome what might be their biggest overall flaw? I don’t see it. They are already good at the thing he can bring out of teams and already struggle with the thing his teams struggle with. I am also not sure their biggest problem is related to coaching.

Let’s talk about it.