John Tortorella doesn’t give a rip about the Colorado Avalanche being a big favorite in the NHL’s Western Conference Finals. Las Vegas loves an underdog… especially when it’s Las Vegas.
Expect the veteran head coach to be front and center when his team takes the ice at Ball Arena on Wednesday night to begin what promises to be a bruising playoff series with the Avalanche. He’s technically the “interim” head coach of the Vegas Golden Knights, having taken over the job with just eight games left in the regular season. After deciding that the veteran-laden Knights needed a lighter hand, he’s allowed his stars to take the lead, and it’s worked. Vegas is 15-4-1 over the last 20 games; the same record as Colorado over that period.
Tortorella is well-traveled (he’s coached five different NHL squads during his nearly three-decade coaching career) and more than qualified to lead a team to the Stanley Cup Finals. His name is on the 2004 Cup after he led the previously bottom-dwelling Tampa Bay Lightning to the franchise’s first-ever championship. He’s twice been named the winner of the Jack Adams Award as the top coach in the league, and was the first American-born coach to reach 500 career wins.
“Colorful” might be the nicest way to describe the often bombastic Tortorella. He was once fined and suspended for a game for getting into an altercation with fans behind his bench, and suspended again years later for two weeks after trying to enter the opposing dressing room between periods and start what may have become an all-time melee.
Most recently, Tortorella blew off the post-game press conference last week following the Knights series clinching win over Anaheim and has been hit with a fine of $100,000 for it. This, for an “interim” coach whose prorated paycheck for his one week in charge probably isn’t any more than that. He could be essentially coaching for free at this point.
The point is, Tortorella’s pedal-to-the-metal coaching style has rubbed off on a veteran team that already has won a Stanley Cup title back in 2021 – one season before the Avs won their most recent trophy. While the Minnesota Wild can qualify as the “best” team the Avs will face this postseason, based on regular-season point totals, don’t expect Vegas to be anything close to a pushover. This series has seven games written all over it.
The Avs are deeper and more talented overall, but the Knights are hot at the right time, relying on their top three scorers – Pavel Dorofeyev, Brett Howden, and Mitch Marner – to carry the bulk of the scoring load. The trio has scored 24 of the Golden Knights’ 44 goals thus far in the postseason. That’s in sharp contrast to Colorado, which has had 17 different players register at least one goal during these playoffs, tying an NHL record.
That depth, along with the built-in advantage of skating and exerting at high altitude, has proven to be a big edge for Colorado during the first two rounds of the playoffs. Both the Los Angeles Kings and the Wild players wore down in the third periods of the games played in Denver.
But in typical Tortorella fashion, the coach dismissed any talk about the altitude with one word. “Overrated,” he said. If that’s the approach he’s taking with the media, you can just imagine what he’s telling his players behind closed doors.
Those are words that, at least for now, will probably stay in Vegas.
