For maybe the first time in the more than 25 years since he emerged as an NHL coach, John “Torts” Tortorella was easy to miss while on the bench with Team USA in February at the Olympics in Italy.

The 67-year-old veteran who most famously won the Stanley Cup with the 2004 Tampa Bay Lightning is widely known as a firebrand, a reputation largely earned through in-game antics over the years. At his last NHL stop with the Philadelphia Flyers, Tortorella’s incidents included a screaming match with a star rookie and a refusal to leave the rink after receiving a game-misconduct penalty. 

But he understood his role as an assistant on coach Mike Sullivan’s staff at the Olympics and drew no extra attention to himself while the American men’s hockey team soared to its first gold medal in 46 years.

It may have turned out to be good practice. The spotlight will be on him a little more now, but Tortorella says he wants to follow a similar tack as the new head coach of the Vegas Golden Knights.

“I just want to keep my head down here and play and behave myself and help the team try to find its way in such an important time of the year,” he said at a recent news conference. 

In news that sent upheaval through the NHL world, Tortorella became the fourth coach in the history of the Golden Knights on March 29 after the team fired Bruce Cassidy, who helped bring the Stanley Cup to town in 2023. Vegas had gone just 5-10-2 since the Olympic break—the second-worst record in the NHL—with general manager Kelly McCrimmon diagnosing that the team had lost its “spirit.”

Tortorella seemed like a natural replacement if the intention was to stir more emotion out of an underperforming team.

“(He’s) emotional, passionate,” said Vegas star Jack Eichel, who played for Tortorella with Team USA. “Both (the Olympics and Four Nations Faceoff in 2025) were really good experiences. If you talk to guys that have played for him for longer periods of time, they all say the same thing: He cares about his players, he’s emotional, he’s invested in it. I think that’s great for us.”

The makeup of the Golden Knights is another reason why Tortorella is trying to exercise a new level of calm. He described his last two jobs in Philadelphia and Columbus as rebuilding franchises.

That’s not Vegas, which has a veteran roster and championship experience.

“To come into a team that just understands how to win, has won, has played in a bunch of playoff series, who am I kidding,” Tortorella said. “This is something I’ve self-taught for the time I’ve been given for a great opportunity—just get out of the way and learn from (the players). I need to take information from them. … I want them to be able to come to me and say what’s on their mind.”

That doesn’t mean Tortorella won’t implement some of his own tweaks, especially when the playoffs begin April 18—assuming Vegas holds onto its spot.

He wants to be more fluid with his forward lines and defensive pairs, especially as games progress. He hinted at using the team’s three best players—Eichel, Mark Stone and Mitch Marner—together more frequently. Cassidy only employed the Big Three strategy for two shifts totaling less than 2:30 of ice time over the first 74 games this season. 

“If I see something and my eye test or stomach say, maybe you need to move something around to spark something, I’ll do it,” Tortorella said. “Been criticized many years, many times that I’m moving players all over the place. I really don’t give a sh*t.”

Perhaps that response illustrates that his old ways aren’t totally gone yet. But he hopes gratitude and poise prevail more than frustration and intensity at his new stop, where he’s only contracted to remain through the end of this season.

This story appeared in Las Vegas Weekly.