The genuine anger of Torts and his "truthful" albeit sometimes inaccurate criticisms make him seem more accountable and therefore, less at fault for failures. Also, the game he plays and makes the team play is a hard working game. When team is losing = team not working hard enough therefore he gets to say things like "we need to be better, play harder etc." and make himself look good. His blunt criticism of certain players, situations also helps deflect criticisms and blame. He also doesn't answer key questions and gets away with some aspects of his failures.
Interesting....
Yeah, Torts should write a book on this. He is amazing at it.
-Its like he every time there is even a remote excuse for something he says something like: "We are not going to make the road trip an excuse for not working hard". And the media writes something like, "NYR came out looking tired after a 3 game road trip. John Tortorella however held the team accountable and said they wouldn't use that as an excuse."
-If we lost a game against a team that just got decent goaltending, he always blamed the loss on the team we played against getting quote "better" goaltending. He almost never gave Hank credit for a win.
-We lived -- solely -- on getting D's on the team we played against to cough up pucks. God forbid one of our D's ever gave the puck away. He named them and tore them apart infront of the media.
If D's in this league are pressured, they will sooner or later cough up pucks. When Callahan forces a turnover and we get a chance, from the other side it is a D coughing up the puck. Its as simple as that. That was our main source of offense. But like I said, any time WE lost a game thanks to one of our D's being pressured by a "Callahan" on the other team, Torts was generous for not letting that D walk home after the game...
-His talk about tough camp lol. Jesus christ what a bunch of BS. Anyone, even the person just working out to stay in shape who never have played pro sports, understands that you cannot in any way long term impact someone's physical status during a period of two weeks. Not to mention a professional athleet.
What you do in camp, how hard you skate in camp, will have an extremely marginal impact in relation to the conditioning of a player during an 82-game season. These guys have built up their bodies over a 15-25 year period. What Torts did was having his team skate hard for -- in reality -- 3 days or something like that in camp. Then he ran a camp just like everyone else, after the intial drills. Then he went on and on about how well conditioned his players where thanks to it. 100% BS propaganda.
-Torts was tough towards media, and hence his team was perceived as "tough". We were never physical under Torts. Looking at big hits, Strålman landed like one per season and then MDZ maybe had one or two here and there, besides that we never hit. We must have been one of the least physical teams in the league to play against. What, 3 or 4 big hits over the course of 3 seasons.
We didn't even really consistently in any meaningful way stand up for each other, besides maybe for shorter periods last season.
Nobody ever called us out for being maybe the softest team in the league in terms of hitting under Torts. Imagine if Renney would have iced a team that litterary never landed a bigger hit, 90% of the fans would hate him for icing such a soft team.
Torts was really really a master at not taking responsibility for the team he puts on the ice. It was even like the worse coached team Torts put on the ice, the softer it was, the less the players worked on the ice, the more some liked Torts.
