John Tortorella came to New York with a reputation as the toughest sheriff around. He was going to be the demanding presence to hold players accountable no matter the names on the backs of their sweaters or the numbers on the dotted lines of their contracts.
He was going to the first Rangers coach since Mike Keenan to bench marquee people, consequences be damned, because once a coach cedes his authority regarding the lineup to either his athletes’ reputations or his general manager’s personnel mistakes, the consequences are damning, anyway.
Now is the time for Tortorella to take action — now, before tonight’s rematch at the Coliseum against the Islanders. Today, before he and the Rangers suffer their second embarrassment within 24 hours after last night’s 2-1 defeat at the Garden.
Now is the time for Tortorella to personally embrace the “Safe is Death,” philosophy he espoused in Tampa and have the nerve to tell Glen Sather, his boss, that the millions he spent on Wade Redden and Michal Rozsival would have been better invested with Bernie Madoff.
Now is the time for the head coach to justify the badge on his chest by figuring out how to reduce Chris Drury’s minutes and responsibility without embarrassing the earnest but painfully ineffective captain, no easy task at all.
Tortorella was furious in the wake of last night’s no-show in which the Rangers were limited to two goals or fewer for the seventh straight time and 17th time in their last 21 games. They hadn’t sunk to such levels of impotence since December of 2002 when they also went seven in a row during some of the darkest days of the seven-year playoff drought that preceded the lockout.
In other words, these are the Bad Old Days.
The Rangers’ 7-15-3 nosedive to the bottom of the Atlantic and toward the nether regions of the NHL has the smell of a death march and the feel of a team quitting on its coach. This has the feel of last February when the Rangers could not, would not and did not respond to Tom Renney.
But that came deep into Renney’s fourth full season, a time when players often become tired of listening to the same voice. And it came during a year in which the coach who had built so much of his success in conjunction with Jaromir Jagr could not get the team to buy into his approach in No. 68’s absence.
It is all but impossible to believe that the Rangers are quitting on their second coach in less than six hockey months, no matter how abrasive or confrontational Tortorella might-or might not-be while interacting with the athletes. It can’t be.
But if the impossible is not, if the Rangers somehow are shutting down on this coach whom they professed to be ready to follow through a brick wall in September, shame on them. They have not earned the right.
Now that the Rangers don’t have the puck the way they did the first few weeks of the season, Redden is regressing to last season. Rozsival has had a couple of marginally better performances since last Wednesday in Chicago, but he won’t touch a soul.
It would seem impossible for a coach to preach accountability while dressing this pair of soft veterans every night. It would seem impossible to jump-start a moribund offense by continuing to go to the Drury Well that, at least for the moment, seems to have run inexplicably dry.
Tortorella talked tough last night. Guess what? Renney talked tough, Ron Low talked tough and so did John Muckler, Colin Campbell and Sather himself when he was behind the bench. They talked tough but coached easy.
After huffing and puffing about how he found the effort unacceptable, this coach was asked just what he would do to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again tonight at the Coliseum.
“That will be something we will decide before tomorrow night,” he said. “There has to be something done.”
Something has to be done all right. It starts with Tortorella actually living up to his reputation. It starts with putting his lineup where his mouth is.
If this coach can’t or won’t do that, his badge will come to represent nothing but a tinhorn regime.