Tortorella won't admit it, but at least on Tuesday, he got the response he wanted from his scratch of Sean Couturier

In the immediate wake of the Philadelphia Flyers’ much-needed 4-3 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs, Morgan Frost was asked if he thought John Tortorella’s scratching of Flyers captain Sean Couturier was intended to be a jolt to the team, to snap them out of their recent skid with a dramatic shifting of the status quo.

“I’m not sure. You’d have to ask if Torts will give you an answer on that,” Frost responded.

In other words: good luck.

And Frost was right. Tortorella did indeed refuse to go into detail behind his decision to scratch Couturier.

“As I told you, I’m putting the players out on the ice to win a particular game. And these were the 20 that we decided to go with,” he said after the first attempt by members of the media at bringing up Tuesday’s biggest Flyers-related story.

OK, perhaps a second attempt at gleaning more from Tortorella might prove fruitful.

“I’m not talking about Sean,” Tortorella curtly responded. “I’m not debating with you. I’m not conversing with you. That’s between Sean and I. So talk to me about the game, guys.”

So let’s take one more shot, this time positioning it in terms of the team’s in-game response to the scratch, and whether that was what he wanted to see from them.

“It has nothing to do with Sean being out. Our team played good tonight,” Tortorella answered.

OK, then.

But the idea that the team’s performance on Tuesday had nothing to do with the decision to sit Couturier — the first time a team captain had been scratched in a meaningful regular season game since 2013-14, per Guillaume Villemaire of TVA Sports — is difficult to swallow. Players aren’t robots, and Couturier is enormously respected in the Philadelphia locker room.

“He’s still our leader, and we all love him,” Morgan Frost reiterated after the win.

As much as Tortorella tried to spin the benching as solely between he and Couturier, and merely a straightforward example of lineup accountability, Tortorella surely isn’t naive enough to truly believe that the impact of the move would be limited to Couturier himself. The scratching was undeniably a risk in terms of how it would be received by his group as a whole — especially given the team’s underwhelming recent play. It could serve as a necessary shake-up of what was quickly becoming a stale status quo at the worst possible time, sure — but it also very well could have accelerated the spiral, as Couturier’s teammates rolled their collective eyes at the gambit and continued to make even more of the mistakes that helped to inspire the scratching in the first place.

To Tortorella’s almost certain relief, Tuesday’s result was the former.

Regardless of one’s opinion on the scratch itself, it is undeniable that the Flyers’ recent play leading up to the Couturier benching was untenable if the club still had designs on making the postseason. Yes, the blueline corps is gutted due to injury (and the Sean Walker trade). And yes, poor goaltending can torpedo any club no matter how structurally sound, as it did for the Flyers at key moments over the past two weeks. But the breakdowns and meltdowns on the part of the skaters were real, as was the team’s 5-7-2 record over the past month. Those kinds of results were simply not going to cut it.

The status quo needed changing.

And at least on Tuesday night, that change was a positive one.

The improvements were numerous. Goaltender Sam Ersson delivered a bounceback game (with the help of his goalposts), stopping 27 of 30 shots after making only nine saves on 12 shots five nights ago against this very club. And this time, he was supported by a far more active team defense, both in terms of consistent backchecking and a renewed commitment to shot blocking — the group had whopping 36 blocks on the night.

“Well, we blocked some shots. It’s something we haven’t done consistently enough,” Tortorella said. “I just thought our team defense in the middle of the ice, when there were breakdowns, were willing to block shots and have their sticks on the ice.”

But most importantly, key top-of-the-lineup players stepped up in Couturier’s absence — namely, a trio of “young veterans” in Morgan Frost (one goal, one assist), Owen Tippett (one goal, one assist) and Cam York (one assist, 26:07 minutes). And given Tortorella’s response to a question regarding their emergence, it seems likely that he was very much hoping for that very outcome when he chose to sit Couturier.

“It’s huge. Those guys deserve to be in the lineup,” Tortorella said. “They have played well. And they get these opportunities.”

They deserve to be in the lineup — unlike, Tortorella appeared to be implying, the scratched captain. And in turn, they rose to meet the challenge of knowing that Couturier wasn’t there to stabilize things on the bench, or take tough shifts late closing out the game.

“Yeah, he’s obviously a big part of our team, and when you when you lose a guy like that, you got to fill a void, and guys have got to step up,” Tippett said.

There are lots of ways Tortorella’s decision could have blown up in his face in the short-term. Had the Flyers been taken apart by the Leafs again — even if said blowout had little to do with the scratching (after all, they got demolished last week by Toronto with Couturier in the lineup) — there would have been much theorizing that Tortorella had “lost the locker room” due to his controversial decision. And had the Flyers blown their two-goal third-period lead as they almost did, Tortorella would have rightfully been raked over the coals for sitting the player on their roster most experienced and adept in those situations.

Instead, the Flyers ended their two-game skid, nabbing two big points in the process. Key young players stepped up in the wake of Couturier’s absence. The team as a whole tightened up defensively. And now, Tortorella can bring Couturier back into the lineup in the coming days from a position of strength rather than weakness.

He got exactly the outcome he surely wanted.

It remains to be seen whether Tortorella’s scratching of Couturier will produce any negative consequences for the head coach over the long-term. He’s still playing a dangerous game with his locker room when he resorts to tactics guaranteed to garner national attention and embarrass players in the process. Perhaps the Flyers’ room has truly become significantly stronger in the interim, but it was less than three years ago when this same club tuned out Alain Vigneault in large part due to similar button-pressing with scratches and dismissive public comments that quickly delivered diminishing results in terms of its effect on the players.

Engaging in open conflict with the team captain runs the risk of heading down the same road that Vigneault did — especially with Couturier as recently as Tuesday morning still at a loss to explain exactly what Tortorella wants to see from him in order to earn back his old role. Maybe positioning himself as a unifying villain for his own players can have a galvanizing “we’ll win to spite him” effect in the short-term, pushing the team to the playoffs. But it remains to be seen if such an adversarial approach can continue to produce positive results. Only time will provide a true answer to that question.

In the here and now, however, Tortorella’s controversial decision delivered the exact jolt that he likely hoped it would.

Even if he won’t confirm as much publicly.