“But we made our own bed here the last couple years. “There’s doubters out there, for sure,” Laughton said. The Flyers are already taking that to heart. Even I went on Snow the Goalie last week and predicted a last place finish for the Flyers in the Metropolitan Division, although I still think there will be some improvement from a season ago, simply based on Tortorella’s coaching and a lot of young players developing within his system. Not many people in hockey think much of them as a team this season. We had some lousy minutes (Thursday) but we found a way to get it done.”Īnother thing is, the Flyers feel a little disrespected. How many teams win when maybe they didn’t play their best hockey, and the other team played more better minutes than them? You find a way to get it done. Maybe only 35-40 minutes of it is good hockey, but if you continue to play hard, you find a way. I just want the team that plays against us to say, ‘man, they play hard.’ Because I think in this league, if you’re true and honest and you play hard, you find a way to get into the win column more often than not. Playing that way is certainly a part of it. I envision what I’d like to see it be, but we gotta go through the steps to get there. Tortorella didn’t speak to Laughton directly, but he did describe what he’s looking to create with his team and Laughton is the perfect type of player for younger players to watch and bring this style back to Philadelphia: Might the Flyers new coach be seeing a parallel between them, some two decades later? He plays now a lot like Andreychuk did in his later years, and the two have similar leadership skills. Laughton is no Andreychuk offensively, but he is the second-longest tenured Flyer behind Couturier, and although he is only 28, Thursday kicked off his 10th NHL season. Now, Andreychuk was toward the end of a Hall of Fame career at that point, and was a prolific offensive player, but the final eight seasons of his career, he was mostly a third liner, who played hard minutes and was a grinder and a leader who didn’t score as much as the stars on that team.īut it was the kind of guy Tortorella turned to in an effort to bring that group together to win a championship. When you go back to Tortorella’s first team, the captain of his Stanley Cup winning Tampa Bay Lightning was veteran forward Dave Andreychuk. Part of that is Torts molding his players into the collective he wants, but part of it is also missing guys like Coots, Atkinson, and Ellis, who likely would have been team leaders if they weren’t injured.īut to give Laughton the only ‘A’ when guys like Ivan Provorov and Kevin Hayes were on the ice, it speaks volumes of what the coaches think of Laughton and secondarily what they feel he can do to help shape a new identity for the Flyers.Ĭould he be a guy who eventually emerges as a captain? Yes. There’s been a lot made about the Flyers not having a captain to start the season. It was really interesting to see him as the lone leadership representative on the ice. I understand the frustration, but do you really think the guy wants to be saddled with a career-threatening injury? Booing the guy is not fair. Not the best ovation for Ryan Ellis 😂😂 /KTiHqUhdzd One where the fans took it too far though was on the introduction of injured defenseman Ryan Ellis:
It was a real message from the fans that they were there and they were watching, but that the team had a lot of work to do to prove it deserved their vocal appreciation once again. As individuals were being introduced, there were almost cricket chirps coming from the robust crowd of 19,107, which is a little higher than what was actually in the building, but not much.Įventually Tortorella got the first big applause, and then only a handful of players really got to hear the crowd’s appreciation, including the injured Sean Couturier and Cam Atkinson, and a few of the players who played last night as well. We knew we were going to have a great crowd, so it was important to have a great start and get the crowd into it.”īecause the crowd wasn’t into it pre-game.
“It was intentional, yes,” Laughton said. Send a message.Īnd Laughton, the only player on the ice with a letter on his sweater, was trying to lead the way – and did so with a little piss and vinegar in his game. There were no fights, but there didn’t have to be. Laughton was in the middle of several scrums and nastiness that took place on opening night. It was the same kind of piss and vinegar that was on display on the ice by Laughton for an entire 60 minutes of hockey against the Devils. “We didn’t even make it through one fucking song,” he lamented, kicking off his skates in disgust. So as the media filed in to the locker room, Laughton lamented that the celebration music didn’t even make it through the first song, before it had to be turned down so the media could conduct their interviews.
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