It’s not often that you see an NHL team make their captain a healthy scratch, especially when they are in the final stretch of the season and still in a fight to secure a playoff position.
It was a big topic of conversation after Philadelphia Flyers head coach John Tortorella made captain Sean Couturier a healthy scratch against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Tuesday. Tortorella made it known he wants to see more from Couturier who has struggled this season.
“I’ll never worry about him as far as effort, as far as attitude,” Tortorella said. “He is a pro. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. I’m not worried about that. I need him to be better, that’s all.”
Florida Panthers head coach Paul Maurice has been in Tortorella’s position before, back during his time with the Carolina Hurricanes when he decided to scratch captain Rod Brind’Amour back in 2009.
“It was a regular-season game in Pittsburgh and we won like 2-1. I still remember it, and it is a hard thing to do,” Maurice said Wednesday during an appearance on Real Kyper & Bourne. “When you walk into a room, as a coach, I think you establish a certain trust, but before trust, a certain amount of truth like ‘we’re going to do this as a hockey team, we’re going to handle these four or five things.’
“How far down the line do you get before you scratch a guy? There’s technique in that style and also the personality of the coach. If you’ve done it, two or three other guys, and they’re all looking at you going, ‘Hey, just bench those three guys and now it’s his turn,’ because he just broke the code or whatever that is. It’s the kind of a spot where if you don’t do it, you have a real problem. But it doesn’t happen very often.”
Maurice says Brind’Amour hasn’t forgotten.
Scratching and benching players have been common tactics for Tortorella during his time as an NHL coach. Sometimes the player responds, but other times it can lead to messy situations, as seen most recently when Kevin Hayes requested a trade out of Philadelphia.
Maurice believes that a tactic like that isn’t something that works for every coach in the league.
“Every team has its own set of rules and the coach has a certain bandwidth of truth that he has to stay in for every player, but it’s also not true,” Maurice explained. “Anything outside that, you know, what if Aleksander Barkov serves a pizza right up the middle and they score a goal? Yeah, I’m not going to be scratching him there.”
For Maurice, he hasn’t been shy to do what he thinks is necessary to get his team going. One night last season stuck out in particular.
With the Panthers in a final push to make the playoffs, Maurice took time during a coach’s challenge against the Leafs to express his discontent with his team’s play in the game.
“It was an absolutely honest reaction to the style of play that night. It was born out from the second period against the New York Rangers on Jan. 2, where we had been a pretty good hard team, we played hard and right,” Maurice said. “But there was always this kind of tug to go back to this trading chances flow game and snapping around, but we weren’t that team anymore.
“Somebody turned the puck over right at the blue line in front of my bench, and then they scored and it was offside, so I got this kind of free time out and truly just lost my mind.”
Maurice said it was an honest reaction, and he told his team that if they wanted to be successful he wasn’t going to beg the team to do it anymore, it was going to be on them.
From that moment on, Florida would find a way to earn the final playoff spot and go on a Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Final, where they lost to the Vegas Golden Knights.
The team has carried that momentum over to this season and remain a contender in the East. They would face Toronto in the first round if the season ended today.