Cassidy (L) is out with Vegas; Tortorella (R) is in.
As I’ve written before, there are basically two kinds of NHL coaches: the currently-unemployed, and the soon-to-be unemployed.
The league’s average bench boss lasts just 2.4 seasons in his job, and about 15 percent of the league’s teams fire their coaches in the middle of a given season in recent years, on top of any offseason coaching moves they might make. If you want stability and job security, “hockey coach” is probably pretty far down the list of professions you should seek out.
Even by that standard, though, the change made Sunday by the Vegas Golden Knights stood out. With just a few weeks (and a handful of games) left in the regular season, Vegas dumped Bruce Cassidy — who led the team to its first and only Stanley Cup in 2023 — in favor of longtime Lightning, Rangers and Blue Jackets (among others) coach John Tortorella.
The move wouldn’t have been all that shocking except for the timing. Much like what we saw at the tail-end of the NBA season a year ago, it’s quite uncommon for a probable playoff team to make a coaching change this deep into the schedule. Since the league returned to normal 82-game seasons after the pandemic in 2021-22, here’s a plot of when every in-season coach move happened:
As we can see, no team in the past five years changed coaches at a later date than these Golden Knights; the only data point especially close was last year’s Philadelphia Flyers, who cut loose Tortorella — of all coaches — on March 27, but Philly was not close to the playoffs (and in fact, finished last in the Eastern conference). Vegas, by contrast, still had a 77 percent chance to make the playoffs as of Monday morning.
To find comparison points further back in history, we have to turn to the Lou Lamoriello-era New Jersey Devils, who twice fired the coach of a playoff team with mere weeks left in the regular season.
The more recent case came in 2006-07, when Lamoriello fired Claude Julien (despite a 47-32 record) and installed himself behind the bench, eventually leading New Jersey to a first-round playoff win over Tortorella’s Lightning — god, hockey is a small world! — before falling in Round 2. But the gold-standard for these types of late-season coach swaps came in 2000, when Lamoriello also axed famous bench-thrower Robbie Ftorek (41-25-8) in favor of Hall of Fame defenseman turned coach Larry Robinson, who guided New Jersey all the way to victory in the Stanley Cup final:
We don’t know whether Tortorella is destined to do the same for Vegas this year. The Golden Knights have the league’s 13th-oldest roster, which matches Tortorella’s reputation for leaning on veteran leaders as part of his no-nonsense, sometimes confrontational coaching style. Torts’ struggles in Philadelphia (which I wrote about here) were sometimes ascribed to the mismatch between developing Philly’s young roster and Tortorella’s ability to wring wins out of teams as soon as possible.
Vegas is much more of a fit for the latter approach, though the reality of Tortorella’s relationship with veteran teams is more complicated than simply a preference for coaching experienced players. While his sole Cup-winning squad, the 2003-04 Lightning, were one of the league’s oldest (and best) teams, he’s also done well with younger teams before (such as the 2016-17 Blue Jackets) and in fact, his average team going into this Vegas stint ranked No. 8.5 in the league by youngest average age:
Among Torts’ more vet-laden teams, many have been disappointing and/or bad, the former tag of which does apply to the 2025-26 Golden Knights as well. Now he’ll be tasked with injecting a sense of urgency into a Vegas team that has lost 12 of 16 games since right after the Olympic break, causing their playoff odds to fall from a peak of 98 percent as recently as mid-to-late January to the 75-80 percent range now.
But the main thing he may need relative to Cassidy is easy to ask for, yet difficult to manifest. As I’ve said a version of before: “Show me a fired NHL coach, and I’ll show you a goalie (or goalies) with an .874 Save Percentage.” Reductive as it may seem, more often than not, these NHL coaching changes frequently revolve around something the coach has little to no control over: Goaltending.
The Golden Knights finished no worse than 10th in SV% in any of Cassidy’s previous seasons at helm, sitting at No. 7 in their Cup-winning year. Even when regular starter Logan Thompson was hurt for the playoffs, Vegas got BETTER between the pipes (a .932 SV% from primary starter Adin Hill) and rode that to a championship. This year, though, Vegas ranks just 30th in SV%, which has severely undermined a team that otherwise carries these ranks:
Perhaps the pivot from Cassidy’s cerebral-tactician style to Tortorella’s combustible form of old-school accountability will be exactly what Vegas needs to salvage its playoff odds and its ever-shrinking Stanley Cup potential. But mainly, the success or failure of this late-season coaching switch will ride on what Adin Hill, Akira Schmid and the rest of the Knights’ struggling netminders do to turn their collective season around — regardless of the coaching message in the locker room.