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It's Been Quite A Ride With Torts On Bench

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By JOE HENDERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 31, 2008

Once he is officially fired as coach of the Lightning, John Tortorella figures to be out of work five minutes, maybe less. He'll land one of the big-boy jobs out there in the National Hockey League. Before long he'll be introduced as the new coach at Ottawa, Toronto or maybe San Jose.

He will be in demand.

The first thing they'll talk about in the new city is how he led the Lightning to the Stanley Cup in 2004. They'll get excited, even though around here with each passing season it gets a little harder to believe that miracle ever happened.

So maybe it's time for a change.

Everybody's message gets stale after a while and after a season in which the Bolts fell to the bottom of the 30-team NHL, Torts' frustration reached lava-flow proportions. He didn't have the players or the goalie he wanted, and the ownership mess left him with a paralyzed front office that couldn't provide the type of team he needs.

It couldn't work like this.

The question is, can it work like this?

Oren Koules is about to make his splash as the Bolts' new owner by firing the best coach the franchise ever had. But replacing him with Barry Melrose, a guy who has been on television - out of coaching - since the mid-1990s? Gentlemen, start your head-scratching.

That's what the buzz is, anyway. Melrose issued the obligatory non-denial denial after news broke Friday of these impending moves, but his name has been linked to this job for a while now.

Technically, Tortorella will remain the Lightning's coach for about 21/2 more weeks, but once Koules' takeover of the franchise gets league approval June 18, Torts will be gone.

Can General Manager Jay Feaster be far behind?

It's His Team

Koules will certainly have the right to run this hockey team his way, but hiring Melrose would be a huge gamble. He coached the Los Angeles Kings to the Stanley Cup finals in 1993 - the same season the Lightning began play - but he was gone two seasons later and hasn't been behind a bench since.

He's well-known through his work on ESPN, but if this is the guy he better bring more than good sound bites and nice hair. These Bolts have fallen into disrepair, mostly through front-office mistakes and their eternal, unfilled quest to find a goalie capable of replacing Nik Khabibulin.

They'll catch a break by drafting exciting young talent Steven Stamkos with the first pick in the upcoming draft, but this team was 31-42-9 last season with Vinny Lecavalier and Marty St. Louis.

Tortorella didn't get dumber all of a sudden, but he also couldn't find the answers. You can say he was impatient with his goalies, but no one in the conga line that has followed Khabibulin has been good enough to run out there on a nightly basis anyway.

He tried everything.

He pushed, he backed off.

He bellowed, he mellowed.

He ripped his players, he defended them.

Nothing worked.

Even with the impending arrival of Stamkos, I'm not sure Torts has patience for the kind of rebuilding job that lays ahead for this team. But some other team in another city is about to get extremely lucky. Coaches like this don't come available too often.

Quite A Ride

So we prepare to bid farewell to "shut yer yap" - to a driven, relentless hockey man who could never play the good corporate soldier. You'd never call Torts a company man and I mean that in a good way.

We'll remember how he built a team that made a city care, however briefly, about hockey. We'll remember the seven-game knockout of Philadelphia to go to the Cup finals for the first time. We'll remember how, down 3-2 and headed to Calgary, where they had the celebration ready, he guaranteed the Bolts would win.

They did.

Winning is all he cared about.

It's all anyone should care about.

It's what they'll care about in whichever new city Torts calls home. Perhaps one day we'll rediscover what that feels like here. That day seems a long way off though.

Longer today than the day before.

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