With less than three weeks remaining in the regular season, the Vegas Golden Knights are making a sudden coaching change. The team announced Sunday that they have fired head coach Bruce Cassidy, replacing him with former Philadelphia Flyer head coach John Tortorella.
“With the stretch run of the 2025-26 regular season upon us, we believe that a change is necessary for us to return to the level of play that is expected of our club,” Golden Knight general manager Kelly McCrimmon said in a statement. “With John Tortorella, we bring in a Stanley Cup Champion as well as one of the most experienced and respected coaches in the NHL. His guidance will be a great asset to our team at the pivotal point in the season we currently face.”
Cassidy joined Vegas in 2022, and won a Stanley Cup with the team in his first year as head coach. He led the team to the postseason three seasons in a row, and was set to do the same this year.
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Instead, McCrimmon will hand over the reigns to Tortorella, a veteran NHL head coach who last won a Stanley Cup in 2004. Tortorella was fired by the Flyers last year after getting into “a heated verbal exchange” with one of his players and publicly said that he was “not really interested in learning how to coach” in a losing season
Tortorella will coach the last eight games of the regular season before help the team in the playoffs. As of Sunday, Vegas is third in the admittedly lackluster Pacific Division, making a postseason berth quite easy to lock up in the coming weeks.
This story will be updated.
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