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| avigerver |
There is growing talk
around the league commentary that New York Rangers coach John Tortorella should
be a top candidate if not the winner of the Jack Adams Trophy for coach of the
year. I had been thinking about this for
a little while and then when I heard Don LaGreca say it on Monday following the
Mats Zuccarello interview on NHL Live I thought on it some more. Today you have both Pierre
LeBrun of ESPN and Kevin
Allen of USA Today giving Torts the nod in their respective midseason
awards reports.
The argument for
Tortorella is a compelling one considering the expectations for the Rangers
coming into the season, the massive number of injuries the team has suffered to
key players and the number of young players either being mixed in as rookies or
asked to take on key roles to be 6th in the Eastern Conference
speaks volumes to the job that Tortorella has done.
If you had said
before the season that the Rangers are without Prospal the whole first half, Gaborik
14 games, Callahan 12, Drury 31 along with lesser injuries to Christensen,
Boogaard and Rozsival (in his time here) while incorporating five players that
made their NHL debuts the consensus is the Rangers would be where the Islanders
are and not sixth place.
Part of the reason
Tortorella has had so much success this season is he appears to be more at
peace with everything that is going on around him and more comfortable with his
own club. There are still the moments
where he snaps, but he has become a somewhat softer version of himself and that
has helped many of the young players with their transitions both to and within
this level.
The biggest reason
the Rangers are where they are right now is that Tortorella has installed and instilled
a system for this team to always fall back on.
When you are a team that has less pure talent than your opponent’s you
must be a difficult team to play against and bring a physical style of play to
help and negate the other team’s skill advantages. Tortorella has done a beautiful job of that
with this club in getting them to be a forecheck based offense while blocking
shots defensively. He knows the club
will have to rely on its goaltending and he has stuck to the plan all year of
getting Henrik Lundqvist his time off while watching Biron be a more than capable
backup.
Possibly the best
thing Tortorella has done for this team from the outset aside from the system
itself is take away an excuses whether it be for poor play or the
injuries. Teams can fall back on those
types of excuses and get buried under the crutch that they are using. Torts has not allowed the team to do that and
in return this team has done a tremendous job of not only fighting through it
game to game, but within games as they lead the NHL in points when trailing
heading into the third period.
The Rangers success
in large measure is predicated on the adjustments the man behind the bench has
made not only within the team but himself and he certainly deserves to be under
consideration for coach of the year.
Personally I do not believe he is the winner at the moment with
candidates like Craig Ramsey, Marc Crawford, Guy Boucher and my winner the
underappreciated Barry Trotz as he has Nashville sitting in 4th in
the West. Who knows with 38 games left
to go the Rangers can propel Torts to the top of the list before all is said
and done.
