Tortorella hired as Golden Knights coach to bring spark, energy for stretch run, playoffs

A jolt of energy. A kick in the pants. That’s what the Vegas Golden Knights felt they needed, and that’s why they replaced Bruce Cassidy with John Tortorella as coach Sunday with eight games to go in the regular season.

Some would call it panic. They’d call it patience.

“Somewhere along the way, we lost our spirit, and we lost our energy as a team,” Vegas general manager Kelly McCrimmon said Monday. “… We waited as long as we could on this. We see lots of positive signs in spurts in our game. But we just felt that we needed to bring a different person in to lead our team.”

On Jan. 17, the Golden Knights had won seven straight games and sat in first place in the Pacific Division, four points ahead of the Edmonton Oilers.

Since then?

They have gone 8-15-4.

They have fallen to third in the Pacific, six points behind the Anaheim Ducks and three behind the Oilers. They’re in danger of falling out of the Stanley Cup Playoff picture altogether, four points ahead of the Los Angeles Kings, the last team below the cut line in the West.

“You need to make hard decisions,” McCrimmon said. “The easiest thing in the world is to do nothing.”

Make no mistake: This was hard, even though it fit the Golden Knights’ cold and bold history of parting with popular people and bringing in big names.

After Cassidy became coach at the start of the 2022-23 season, the Golden Knights went 178-99-43. Their points percentage of .623 ranked fifth in the NHL. They won the Cup in 2023, lost to the Dallas Stars in seven games in the Western Conference First Round in 2024 and lost to the Oilers in five games in the second round last season.

McCrimmon said he had a great relationship with Cassidy, and he didn’t think Cassidy had lost the locker room, either. The Golden Knights expect to compete for the Stanley Cup and didn’t want to waste an opportunity.

“I think just the energy level, for me, wasn’t there,” he said. “It just wasn’t there. I think we’re a better team than what we’re playing. We’re in the results business. … We waited, we waited and we waited. We were in a situation where we needed to take action.”

Tortorella is a fiery competitor who won the Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2004 and ranks ninth in NHL history with 770 wins. The Philadelphia Flyers fired him March 27, 2025, when they were one point ahead of the Buffalo Sabres for last in the East with nine games to go. But that was a rebuilding team. This is the best team he has had in ages.

The 67-year-old is signed through the rest of this season. McCrimmon said both sides would reevaluate afterward.

“John has great passion, great energy,” McCrimmon said. “He’s a great communicator. He’s very respected in the industry, experienced, comfortable in his own skin. I think he’s going to give our team a spark. That’s what I feel.

“Our team, if we didn’t have the expectations and the belief in our team that we do, we probably would have let this thing ride out. We like our team a lot. We like our team a lot, and we think our team has a chance to win, and we needed to make this change to help that happen.”

There is no time to waste. The Golden Knights host the Vancouver Canucks at T-Mobile Arena on Monday (10 p.m. ET; SCRIPPS, SNP).

Tortorella said he wouldn’t make many changes. He went over a few points of emphasis in his first team meeting Monday. He talked about “mindset” and “hardness.”

“Just like to see us play faster,” Tortorella said. “Everybody wants to play fast, right? It’s an easy word to say, but I think that comes into mindset also. So, yeah, we’ll pick away at it, but I am not going to overthink this. I am not going to overload them and paralyze them. We’ve got some quality people here. I want to come in here and try to help.”

There are many examples of midseason coaching changes sparking championships.

In recent history, the 2008-09 Pittsburgh Penguins replaced Michel Therrien with Dan Bylsma; the 2011-12 Kings went from Terry Murray to John Stevens to Darryl Sutter; the 2015-16 Penguins replaced Mike Johnston with Mike Sullivan; and the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues fired Mike Yeo in favor of Craig Berube.

None of those changes came this late in the season. But the Golden Knights can look back to the 1999-2000 New Jersey Devils, who fired Robbie Ftorek on March 23 in first place with eight games to go. Larry Robinson led them to the Cup.

“To get an opportunity in this point of my career to come here? Are you kidding me?” Tortorella said. “So, I am trying to do the best that I can, and I just want to help. That’s what I told the boys today. We’re going to do it together. A good man lost his job. That affects these guys. Don’t think it doesn’t. We’ve got good people in our game. They feel for (Cassidy) too. And so, we’ve got to try to make a stand here.”