The Philadelphia Flyers let a two-goal third-period lead slip away on Saturday, dropping a 4-3 overtime decision to the Boston Bruins.
That is not really what had Flyers head coach John Tortorella fired up after the game.
It was what he perceived to be some diving by the Bruins that helped contribute to the Flyers tallying 16 penalty minutes (to only eight for Boston). The Bruins turned one of those penalties into a power play goal to cut into what had been a 2-0 Flyers lead.
Before Tortorella took any questions in his post-game meeting with the media, he immediately went on the attack about diving and how it is one of the things he coaches his team to not do.
“One thing I teach my team to do is not dive,” he said at the beginning. “Maybe I should start teaching them that, the way this has gone here, the way this s–t goes on, maybe I should start teaching them how to dive.”
You can see the entirety of his news conference here.
He was asked a follow-up question and if he felt like something was maybe taken from them on Saturday.
“I’m not going to go too deep into it. It’s one of the things we talk about most as a team. We are going to play an honest game. There is no cheating. There is no embarrassing referees. You don’t embarrass referees. The s–t that went on here tonight is just ridiculous. I’m proud of the way our team played. Did we piss another one away? Yeah. But other people had a little bit to do with that also.”
This is a subject that has already inspired passion from Tortorella. He absolutely loathes anything that resembles an opponent trying to buy a penalty call by diving and has ranted about this in the past in pretty much all of his previous head coaching stops.
He is also a master at putting the attention onto himself and putting the target on his back, and taking it off of his players. If he goes before the media after a game and rants about what the other team did or what was not called, there is not going to be as much focus put on his players and what they did — or did not do — during the game.
In this case, that would be losing the game after having a two-goal third-period lead.