The Puck Stops Here

John Tortorella has been the coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning since midway through the 2000/01 season. In 2003/04 he led the Lightning to the Stanley Cup and won the Adams Trophy as coach of the year. Since then, his results in Tampa Bay have been getting consistently worse. He is a very intense coach who is known to, on occasion, publically fight with players (such as John Grahame and Vaclav Prospal) who have been soon afterwards moved to other teams.

In recent seasons, Tortorella has played the regular season with a shortened bench. He relies strongly on a handful of players and gives poor icetime to the rest of his roster. This season, the NHL leader in ice time per game is Dan Boyle, Tampa's best defenceman. Boyle only has played 20 games due to injury, but when he has played he has played a lot (27:39 per game). Other Tampa defencemen Paul Ranger and Filip Kuba rank 11th and 14th respectively in ice time per game. No other team has two players in the top 15 in ice time per game (let alone three - which Tampa has). Tortorella does not have a very good defence, nevertheless the best players on his defence play incredible amounts of time.

Among his forwards, Martin St Louis leads all forwards in ice time per game (he is 18th overall in the league), Brad Richards (now with Dallas) is second among forwards (23rd overall in the league) and Vincent LeCavalier is third among forwards (37th in the league). Clearly no coach gives as much of his ice time to as few players as Tortorella does.

This strategy has not been successful. Tampa Bay is currently last in the East Conference. Of course there are other mitigating circumstances (most notably a lack of quality goaltending - it is hoped that Mike Smith, newly acquired from Dallas in the Brad Richards trade will help solve this problem), but I think it is clear that Tortorella's insistence to overplay his best players is a contributing factor.

The best two of Tampa's players (LeCavalier and St Louis) have been able to handle the excessive icetime without breaking down, but Brad Richards was not so fortunate. Richards does not have a particularly good per minute scoring rate (his high icetime partly masks this). He had 51 points in his 62 games with Tampa and is currently tied for the league's worst +/- rating with Radek Bonk of the Nashville Predators at -25. The defence certainly is not playing well despite having several players with excessive amounts of icetime.

John Tortorella has not always overplayed his top players. In his most successful season 2003/04 (where he was coach of the year and won the Stanley Cup) his ice time per game leader was Dan Boyle. Boyle's 22:45 per game placed him 49th in the league. The practise of overplaying Tampa's best defenders is a new one and one that Tortorella has started after his most successful seasons. Among his forwards, 2004 MVP Martin St Louis led Tampa in icetime per game, but placed 18th among forwards in the NHL and Brad Richards was 21st among forwards (for the record - Vincent LeCavalier was 88th behind teammates Cory Stillman and Fredrik Modin).

The idea of playing with a shortened bench for the entire regular season is an interesting one. It is one John Tortorella has tried in Tampa Bay and failed with. He was a successful coach in the past, but not under this system. If Tortorella will not change this strategy he needs to be fired for Tampa Bay to progress. His public fights with some players are another reason to call for Tortorella's firing. I think Tampa will hire a new coach this summer and will improve merely by better allocating icetime. The new coach will keep all the players in the game and not overplay his stars, thus risking their burnout.