John Tortorella blamed the forecheck for Flyers' 4-2 defeat -- here's what he meant

Perhaps you thought that nine consecutive games without a regulation loss would buy the Philadelphia Flyers a little leeway from head coach John Tortorella.

But that’s not Tortorella’s style.

“This team is going to have to forecheck,” Tortorella vowed, banging the podium along with every word of his stern sentence for added effect.

It’s not like the Flyers were blown out on Thursday night for their first regulation loss since November 28 — a 4-2 defeat at the hands of a Nashville Predators team that has gone 14-4-0 in its last 18 games is far from an embarrassing outcome.

It wasn’t that the Flyers lost that irked Tortorella so. It was how they lost, and the fact that it plays into one of his biggest lingering fears regarding the decision to open up the Flyers’ playing style this season and encourage a more risk-taking, rush-centric attack.

“We’re going to have to learn — and this is a part of our game I think we have to get better at — because we have turned our team around into more of a transition-type team, but we’re going to have to forecheck sometimes,” Tortorella grumbled.

“Yeah, we didn’t really have any forecheck going,” Morgan Frost acknowledged. “Just didn’t check well enough.”

So what does Tortorella mean by his forechecking criticism? First, it helps to rule out what he most likely didn‘t mean: simply the act of recovering pucks, specifically after dump-in entries at 5-on-5.

Yes, one could define forechecking as exactly that. But in terms of their ability to recover uncontrolled zone entries, the Flyers weren’t really that bad on Thursday. Per my tracking, they successfully retrieved nine of 26 dump-ins, finishing with a 34.6 percent recovery rate. That’s not great, and it’s below their full-season average (41.53 percent). But two extra recoveries, and the resulting recovery rate would be right above that average. The Flyers did win their fair share of puck battles below the goal line.

Nor have they been especially unimpressive recovering dump-ins over the course of the season — at least in comparison to last year, when they successfully retrieved the puck on 41.41 percent of their uncontrolled entries. This year? Nearly identical.

So what was Tortorella actually angry about? To understand that, it helps to re-watch the lead-up to Nashville’s gamewinning goal — specifically, Sean Walker’s decision to try and carry the puck through the teeth of the Predators’ forecheck.

“I think (Nashville) had the better of the play in the third period, we’re holding on, and we just can’t keep it simple,” Tortorella noted regarding Walker’s decision to attempt a carry-in entry versus a lower-risk dump-in. “We have to try to beat people. It’s basically a one-on-four.”

On this play, the Predators were basically daring Walker to try and dangle the puck through their neutral zone forecheck. They had been doing it all night, sitting back in structure and looking to rope-a-dope the Flyers into turnovers and then attack in quick transition. Tortorella and the group had specifically discussed it during the game itself.

“And we were talking about it, all of us were talking about it all game long: ‘You have to get it in deep, we’re not getting through clean. They’re not opening up,'” he recalled.

Yet with four minutes to go in a tie game, four minutes away from extending their point streak to ten games, Walker tried to drive the lane like prime Allen Iverson, got stripped, and Nashville won the game on the ensuing transition rush.

“It’s stubbornness,” Tortorella noted.

The Flyers are fully capable of playing a forechecking game. They did it all of last year, dumping the puck in on 57.76 percent of their tracked entries. And they have quite a few forwards adept at executing on a good old-fashioned puck-recovery plan. Tyson Foerster has been a beast along the boards, Joel Farabee is much improved as a forechecker this season, Sean Couturier’s anticipation and hockey IQ helps him excel at forcing turnovers, all of Ryan Poehling, Scott Laughton and Garnet Hathaway bring speed and grit to the table — essential forechecking qualities.

The potential issue that Tortorella sees isn’t that the Flyers aren’t capable of forechecking successfully. It’s that they won‘t forecheck — that they’ve become so addicted to the fun of carrying the puck in and attacking primarily off the rush, that when opponents take away those easy neutral zone lanes, they’re going to fruitlessly dash themselves against that structure, like waves on a cliffside.

That’s what Tortorella noticed, not just on Thursday night, but on Tuesday as well, even as the Flyers won in dramatic fashion over the New Jersey Devils in overtime. They still were substantially outplayed at 5-on-5 in that game, garnering just 33.55 percent of the expected goals (per Natural Stat Trick), and Thursday was a repeat of the same issue, with the Flyers managing a mere 38.60 percent xG share. For a club that still ranks in the top-10 in the NHL by xG, it’s a notable mini-slump.

What does the forecheck have to do with those results, you might ask? Quite a lot.

The Flyers were taken to the cleaners at 5-on-5 in these two games because of a deadly combination: they let the other team generate more entries than they did, and they let their opponent generate better entries as well. An NHL team isn’t going to win many games when they give their opponent between nine and 20 more offensive zone possessions, and also allow over 50 percent of those possessions to come with… well, immediate puck possession.

And a big reason for the issue? The Flyers’ current insistence upon carrying the puck into the offensive zone at all costs, rather than accepting that in some circumstances, a dump-in might be preferable.

Take the Walker play, for instance. The turnover was essentially the worst possible neutral zone swing — it took an expected offensive zone possession off the board for the Flyers, and handed the Predators a transition rush possession just seconds later. That’s a sequence that can be manageable if it occurs once or twice a game. If it becomes a recurring problem, however? A team gets 5-on-5 results like the ones the Flyers have the past two games.

That’s not to say that Tortorella wants the Flyers to stop playing a rush-oriented style. They’re still at a 50.03 percent Controlled Entry rate over the full season, and it speaks to the top-down mandate encouraging the players to play the kind of skill-centric game that the front office expects will best suit on-the-way top prospects like Cutter Gauthier and (especially) Matvei Michkov down the road. The Flyers aren’t about to turn back into a dump-and-chase dominant club; they’re too far gone to turn back now.

But there’s clearly a concern on Tortorella’s part that the Flyers could be in the process of losing their handle on the balance they’ve had, which has allowed them to drive play at even strength at near-elite levels despite lacking superstar-level talent: the balance between pushing for controlled entries, but not forcing it so much that turnovers in the neutral zone and blueline are so frequent that the opponent takes control of 5-on-5 play as a result.

Especially because, in Tortorella’s mind, defenses are only going to further tighten up in the coming months.

“When this league gets going, at the end of Christmas, after the holiday, that’s when the grind starts coming in,” he claimed. “If we think we’re going to be this high-flying transition team, spreading (and) stretching and not forechecking, we’re in for a rude awakening. We found that out tonight.”

It makes sense that the Flyers might start to lose that balance at the tail end of their best streak of the season. After all, everything was going their way; Morgan Frost even scored a goal off his foot from behind the net in the first period on Thursday. With the hockey gods clearly smiling upon the team, suddenly, players can start to believe that they can dangle through the defense and attack with speed and control on every single play.

“Sometimes it just gets good to you sometimes, as far as the style of play, and you forget about the grind,” Tortorella said.

So Tortorella made sure he was there to remind them after the 4-2 defeat, to prevent the Flyers from going down a path of finishing with a 55 percent Controlled Entry rate every night — while allowing 15 extra entries to the opposition in the process as a result of that “stubbornness.” Winning the neutral zone, after all, is an equation, not a race to see which team can generate the most shots off the rush.

Perhaps Thursday (and to a lesser extent Tuesday) will be a minor blip, a brief detour away from the 5-on-5 balance that has helped to drive the Flyers’ surprising early success. One could even make the case that Tortorella was overreacting a bit, given the quality of his team’s recent play. This was, after all, their first regulation loss of the entire month of December, and Christmas is just three days away.

But on some level, this was always probably Tortorella’s biggest fear when he decided to let the Flyers “open it up” in 2023-24, and now, he’s seeing signs of that fear coming to terrifying fruition — and he’s going to try and put a stop to it as quickly as he can.

“I hope they learned their lesson pretty quick tonight, because that’s what cost us,” Tortorella said.