LAS VEGAS — Don’t expect many major tactical changes from the Vegas Golden Knights under new coach John Tortorella, who was hired on Sunday to replace Bruce Cassidy with only eight games remaining in the regular season.

“I do not want to change a lot,” Tortorella said Monday morning at the team’s practice facility in Summerlin, Nev. “My change is points of emphasis and mindset. I want to see just a hardness. When you talk about hardness, that’s not body checking, that’s not fighting. That’s a general term, but there are so many headings underneath that, and it comes through mindset. That’s what I want to coach.”

It was Tortorella’s first time speaking with reporters while sporting a steel gray track suit with a Golden Knights logo. It’s the sixth NHL team he has coached over his 23-year career — he last was behind an NHL bench in March of last year, before being fired in Philadelphia — and he expressed several times how fortunate he feels for the opportunity.

Tortorella knows Cassidy well. The two veteran coaches exchanged texts while Tortorella was flying to Las Vegas on Sunday night.

“I thanked him for having the team the way it is right now,” Tortorella said. “Just remember, the guy who left here is a pretty damn good coach, so I feel very fortunate coming into this situation. I’m not going to upset or fill the players with information. I have a few points of emphasis that we’ll go over as a team, and I already did in our first meeting, just about mindset and odds and ends.”

Tortorella wasn’t on the ice for Vegas’ morning skate ahead of Monday night’s game against the Vancouver Canucks, but met with the players before the skate and spoke mostly about a shift in mindset.

“The games I’ve watched, I’d 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 the mindset also.”

Golden Knights assistant coach John Stevens speaking to the group before morning skate.

Tortorella isn’t on the ice as of now. pic.twitter.com/T2bmXo4gHT

— Jesse Granger (@JesseGranger_) March 30, 2026

The Golden Knights lost 12 of their last 16 games under Cassidy, and captain Mark Stone said it could have been that Cassidy’s message wasn’t sticking with the players.

“Sometimes it can take a new voice,” Stone said. “I think the locker room had gone a little stale. We weren’t playing with that emotion that we normally do. I think you saw when we played Edmonton, when we played a rival team, there’s energy. We haven’t been bringing ourselves into the fight.”

Jack Eichel called Cassidy’s firing a “wake-up call” for the players.

“I think that it’s a message that management believes in us, but we have to start playing better,” said Eichel, who played under Tortorella for Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off last year and at the Olympics last month.

Vegas has been abysmal early in games this season, getting outscored 59-77 in the first period. Lately, it has been even worse, with the Golden Knights falling behind 3-0 at some point in four of their last six games. The game before that, they lost 2-0 in Buffalo.

Tortorella said he hasn’t diagnosed the team’s slow starts, and that it’s a tough thing to diagnose. He hopes the hard mindset he hopes to instill in the team helps cure them.

“I’m not going to overthink this,” Tortorella said. “I’m not going to overload them and paralyze them.”

It’s not as if Cassidy hasn’t been preaching these same lines about energy and effort early in games for the last 74 games, but the players seem optimistic that a change is possible under new leadership.

“I think it’s all about energy,” said defenseman Noah Hanifin, who also played under Tortorella for Team USA. “Even the way we play the game, and the way we carry ourselves as a team. It’s about having confidence and swagger, playing fast and playing in the other team’s faces. That’s the recipe we’ve always had when we’ve been good here, and we have to get to that quick.”

Hanifin said playing faster starts with the defensive group getting back to pucks and moving them more quickly up the ice. It’s something the group has struggled with for long stretches this season. The hope is that leads to an improved forecheck, with players thinking less and operating more off instinct.

It’s an unusual circumstance. Even a coach as experienced as Tortorella has never been through anything like it.

“In this business, whether you’re a player or a coach, I think you need to have the ability to accept a challenge,” he said. “I got bombed out of Philly with nine games left last year. Now I come here with eight games left. It’s a couple of crazy situations that I had never been involved in before, but that’s the league. That’s pro sports.”

Tortorella hasn’t had as much success lately, going 115-133-45 over his last four seasons in Columbus and Philadelphia, but he’s now coaching a team in a very different place in its window to contend.

“I’ve been rebuilding for a number of years along the way here in my last couple of stops, and to come into a team that just understands how to win, has won, and has played in a bunch of playoff series,” Tortorella said. “Just get out of the way and you can learn from them also. I need to take information from them. I tried to open up doors of communication in our first meeting today. I want them to be able to come to me and say what’s on their mind. That’s exciting for me.”

Tortorella’s contract in Vegas is only for the final eight games of the regular season — or for as far as the team advances in the postseason — but the Golden Knights still have work to do to qualify. They currently sit in third place in the Pacific Division, four points above the playoff cut line.

Tortorella, who spent the majority of the season working in television as a studio analyst for ESPN, said he always envisioned a return to coaching.

“I never wanted to stop coaching,” he said. “I loved coaching in Philly. That caught me off-guard a little bit when that happened. … I don’t have an agent. I’m not out there chatting it up or trying to find jobs. If something happened, something happened. If something didn’t, I’ve been blessed to be in this league as long as I have.”

Now he is tasked with turning around a team that has lost 10 more games than it has won this season, and helping them reach their lofty expectations, without much time to work.

“I just want to come in, keep my head down and just try to help the best way I can to try to get in (to the playoffs) and see where we go from there,” Tortorella said.