Our illustious leader for life had no intentions of making a coaching change until after the exit interviews with the players. I choose to read that based on those discussions a decision was made to $hit-can the coach.
But I could as well be all wet. Just my interpretation of how things played out. Feel free to disagree.
The day Glen Sather says "Okay.... okay.... so you want the coach gone?" instead of smacking a player out of his office with his half chewed moist cigar is the day when Glen Sather is no longer the GM of the New York Rangers. People are blaming the players putting the fault on them for the firing of the coach through bad mouthing TOrts. Glen doesn't roll that way which is one reason why he's been the long time GM of this Dolan owned team. Glen saw what he saw. Perhaps the players showed how they feel for Glen to pick up on and didn't put the former coach on a pedestal but what are people expecting?
Disgruntled players are supposed to make the coach sound great? Is Glen suppose to ignore the lack of faith the players had in his dump-in system? Are the players suppose to hide their discontent and lack of faith in moving forward with the way he handles the defense, offense, and players? Is Brad Richards suppose to walk into the room and say "Torts was great"? Sure, the guy didn't have a good year but is there a way to keep both Richards and Torts? It's not even about keeping one or the other, it's about the fact that these decisions exist. Is Henrik suppose to walk in there and say nothing about what he feels?
I mean, we have our opinions as fans on whether Torts should have been fired or not and so do the players. If the principle has an interview with students to talk about a teacher and the students are afraid to speak out against the teacher explicitly but insinuates that they are not happy with the teacher's teaching abilities, manners, methods of discipline and effectiveness and makes them uncomfortable and unwilling to perform their duties as students, is the principle suppose to ignore that?
There was no anonymous vote and a ballot. The point of these exit interviews is exactly that: to assess various aspects of the team through the perspectives of the players. When you do in fact pick up on so many problems expressed by players, you do something.
Had Glen not done nothing, it would have been negligent. In the world of managing coach-player relationship, it would be 2nd degree murder of the team.
I just think the players fired Torts line is more about getting traffic on articles.
P.S routing back to thread, the culture that AV wants to change (if that is in fact the case), might be more to do with making this team his as opposed to Torts's. More than half of our team was molded by Torts. As a new coach coming in, I'd want to do something to put my mark on a season before it starts.