{"id":535296,"date":"2026-04-01T20:03:35","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T20:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/535296\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T20:03:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T20:03:35","slug":"why-did-the-golden-knights-wait-so-long-for-a-coaching-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/535296\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did the Golden Knights wait so long for a coaching change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Vegas Golden Knights<\/a> sent shockwaves through the hockey world over the weekend when they dismissed head coach Bruce Cassidy and brought in experienced bench boss John Tortorella. <\/p>\n

With the Golden Knights underperforming their talent level all season long, it\u2019s less surprising that they wanted to make a change than it is when they did it.<\/p>\n

Despite their struggles, Vegas is on track to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and Tortorella took over with just nine games to go before the end of the regular season.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday\u2019s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE<\/a>, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton were joined by former NHL video coach Steve Peters to discuss the timing of Vegas\u2019 change and how unusual it is to swap coaches so close to the playoffs.<\/p>\n

Tyler Yaremchuk: The Golden Knights win their first game with John Tortorella behind the bench. Before we kind of get into the minutiae of all of that, I guess just kind of a blanket opening question, did you view the Golden Knights as a broken team or a team that needed a coaching change, Petey?<\/p>\n

Steve Peters: You know it\u2019s funny because with eight games to go, this is a hard time to make a change. There\u2019s not enough runway for a coach to make adjustments to system play, and even the motivation which Torts is great at, it\u2019s not much of a runway. If you\u2019re gonna make this move, why didn\u2019t it happen a little bit earlier? I do think this is a team that needed a change, and when you look at the Vegas Golden Knights and their management and ownership, they don\u2019t wait. They don\u2019t care about your feelings; they don\u2019t care if it\u2019s your birthday. You\u2019re gonna get fired like that. This is just the way things go for the Vegas Golden Knights. This is the worst statistical season for the Knights; they\u2019re on pace to have their worst winning percentage since it became a franchise back in 17-18. They\u2019re not gonna sit around for that, like, they\u2019re making changes, and so I\u2019m not surprised they made a change. With Bruce Cassidy, we\u2019ve talked about it on this show, too, of what he\u2019s like in the room, and it\u2019s hard, man. It\u2019s hard when you have a coach that coaches like Cassidy in the room every single day. It kind of wears on you, and I think that was showing in their top players. So yes, I think it was time for a change. I\u2019m just surprised they didn\u2019t do it a little bit earlier.<\/p>\n

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here\u2026<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Vegas Golden Knights sent shockwaves through the hockey world over the weekend when they dismissed head coach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5129],"tags":[149,5317,5,4,74,39,5316],"class_list":{"0":"post-535296","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vegas-golden-knights","8":"tag-golden-knights","9":"tag-goldenknights","10":"tag-hockey","11":"tag-nhl","12":"tag-vegas","13":"tag-vegas-golden-knights","14":"tag-vegasgoldenknights"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116331243458919650","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}