How much can one man change — honestly?
It was Tuesday night in the bowels of the Coliseum, and here was John Tortorella, former mercurial coach of Rangers, standing amidst a sea of cameras and reporters, all inching closer and closer, forcing him to squint. He had just led his new team, the Canucks, to a 5-4 overtime win over the Islanders, but with Tortorella things are never that simple.
Under each arm was a young girl he had met through the Garden of Dreams Foundation while coaching across the East River in Manhattan for the past four and half seasons. Fired by the Rangers, he was soon hired in Vancouver, and was adamant about changing his gruff public persona.
One girl was named Taylor, the other Sammy, and before the final question of the scrum, Tortorella stopped his inquisitor and said he had wanted the group to ask Taylor a question first.
“Sure,” a reporter said. “What do you think of the Vancouver Canucks as opposed to the Rangers?”
“They’re awesome,” Taylor said, making Tortorella crack a wide smile, something that was more a constant here in New York than most remember.
The clearest image of Tortorella is that of a disciplinarian, one who was hard on his players and often curt with the media — almost comically so as the games grew with importance. When asked Tuesday morning about the Rangers getting off to a 2-5-0 start under new coach (and former Vancouver headman) Alain Vigneault, Tortorella was stern in his point of view — but polite in delivering it.
“That’s not fair,” he said. “Ask me about our team. I’m not getting involved in that.
“I’ll tell you,” he added, “I loved working for the Rangers, I love the area, we’re going to come back here, sometime. I love everything about the area, but I don’t work there anymore and I’m certainly not going to criticize. I know nothing about what’s going on with the club and that’s not fair to anybody.”
In comparing his former coach with his new one, the Canucks (6-4-1) captain, Henrik Sedin, had a pretty simple answer.
“He’s more involved during games, the way you play,” said Sedin, who played for Vigneault — affectionately dubbed “AV” — for seven seasons. “AV left the room to us a little more and let us run with it, but Torts is more in there after every period, giving you how you played and what you need to do better. I think that’s been very good so far. That’s how you want it to be.”
Tortorella decided on Tuesday to dress just 11 forwards, making former 30-goal scorer David Booth a surprise healthy scratch.
“He’s not doing enough to play,” said Tortorella, who brings his team to New Jersey to take on the Devils Thursday. “Plain and simple.”
The seventh defenseman he dressed, Andrew Alberts, played just one shift in the first period, finishing with 37 seconds of ice time. When pushed about Booth with a second question, the coach guffawed a classic Torts retort.
“I’m not going to get into a public conversation about him,” he said, then quickly ruffled the hats on top of the girls’ heads and went off into a tunnel where he met more of his visitors, and smiled.