Sean Couturier’s agent calls out lack of communication after captain surprisingly scratched

PHILADELPHIA — Ask anyone around the league about John Tortorella scratching a veteran player or key young contributor, and you’ll get some version of the same reply from just about all of them.

That’s just Torts.

And, OK, fair enough. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Tortorella, who made Philadelphia Flyers captain Sean Couturier a healthy scratch Tuesday against the Toronto Maple Leafs, has never shied away from pulling a player who he believes can do more or is actively hurting the team. It’s a big part of why the 65-year-old has lasted in the league as long as he has, having success with multiple organizations, including two Jack Adams Awards as the NHL’s top coach: in 2004 with the Tampa Bay Lightning and in 2017 with the Columbus Blue Jackets.

It’s been a key to his success with the Flyers this season, too. Morgan Frost was the early target, scratched in 10 of the Flyers’ first 20 games before becoming a key second-half contributor. Joel Farabee watched 59 of the 60 minutes from the bench in a game against the New Jersey Devils on Nov. 30 after an early mistake cost the Flyers a goal, then reeled off 14 points in his next 15 games. Even the struggling Cam Atkinson posted 10 points in a six-game span in January shortly after a meeting with Tortorella.

Tortorella still can press the right buttons.

When it comes to scratching Couturier, it’s not like the captain is playing his best hockey. He has just one goal in his last 27 games and one assist in his last nine games. Sure, he hasn’t had the luxury of the most skilled linemates on many of those nights, especially recently, but he’s still not doing enough with the time he’s gotten.

Couturier did make a nice play Saturday on Nic Deslauriers’ goal, charging behind the Boston Bruins’ net and forcing Andrew Peeke into a turnover, leading to the score. Perhaps that should have earned him at least one more shift in what was a 5-3 Bruins lead with nearly six minutes left to play.

On the other hand, you can’t fault Tortorella for sitting him the rest of the way considering what happened. The Flyers continued to pressure the Bruins and scored twice more on goals by Frost and Farabee, and had Felix Sandstrom come up with what was a makable save on Danton Heinen, they very well could have earned at least a point in that eventual 6-5 loss.

So, yeah, perhaps an argument can be made that Couturier deserved to come out of the lineup.

What he also deserved, though, was a better explanation for why it happened.

The most puzzling aspect of Couturier’s scratching is that he hasn’t heard much about it from Tortorella, who, as made clear by general manager Daniel Briere, was the sole decision-maker. Couturier said he has only spoken with the coach “somewhat” about it.

That’s maybe understandable when it’s a younger guy like Frost or Farabee, as Tortorella might just have been intrigued to see how a young player would respond to adversity, but not when it’s the 31-year-old captain who only had the “C” stitched on his sweater a little more than a month ago, on Feb. 14.

And according to Couturier’s agent, communication between the coach and captain has been less than ideal for some time now.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Erik Lupien hadn’t spoken with his client about his getting pulled from the lineup. But he did speak with him several days ago when Couturier’s ice time had already been trending downward. Couturier was averaging about 20 minutes on Jan. 13; he’s at 16:10 per game since.

Couturier was puzzled by his diminished role even before Tuesday’s scratching.

“He was clueless about his ice time, why his ice time went down,” Lupien said. “But he said, ‘I’m just going to manage and play whatever he maybe wants me to play. If it’s 14 minutes, it’s going to be 14 minutes.’”

Just as puzzling to Couturier, according to Lupien, is that the player has had a good rapport with Tortorella since the coach’s arrival before the 2022-23 season, even if Couturier wasn’t healthy enough to play at the time. Tortorella being the driving force behind Couturier getting the captaincy at all, when he previously said no captain would be named this season, also speaks to that.

“Throughout last year and at the beginning of (this) year, in the conversations with Sean, he always told me that Tortorella and him had a pretty good relationship,” Lupien said. “As soon as we get through that character, he’s a pretty funny guy. And the conversations are good with him, and he knows what the team wants and what he wants from him.

“From my point of view, when I saw the news (Couturier was scratched), I’m like, I really hope the communication why and the reasons why are really clear. I hope he’s going to get an explanation soon because he’s the captain, a leader of the team, and he has ‘Philadelphia’ tattooed on his chest since he got drafted. That’s why he wanted to sign there and to sign a long contract. I hope he’s going to get that respect from John Tortorella.”

Perhaps Tortorella is just trying to spark the Flyers, and they did seem to respond Tuesday with a 4-3 win over the Maple Leafs. Maybe he’s hoping Couturier will do what Frost did in January and initiate a meeting with the coach to air his grievances. Maybe he’s just hoping that, as the captain, Couturier will grab the bull by the proverbial horns a bit more and step up at the most important time of the season and with a depleted Flyers lineup in the middle of a playoff race.

Or, as he said after Tuesday’s game, perhaps it’s simply a case of “putting the players out on the ice to win a particular game, and these were the 20 that we decided to go with.”

But scratching Couturier and keeping him in the dark is an unconventional way of trying to achieve any of those things, even if the player’s game needs to be better. And it might even risk rattling the culture the Flyers have worked so tediously to repair and preserve.

Sean Couturier tonight is the first captain in the @NHL to be healthy scratched since Ed Jovanovski in 2013-14
(Excluding when players are rested in the last few games of a season)

— Guillaume Villemaire (@GVillemaire13) March 19, 2024

Being the captain of an NHL team, especially as someone as respected as Couturier, brings with it certain responsibilities. One of them, typically, is being the conduit from the dressing room to the coach’s office. When a coach needs to know the temperature of his room, in good times or bad, he’s going to the captain with the thermometer.

Furthermore, there will surely be a situation at some point, whether it’s this season or beyond, when a young player might be feeling some heat from Tortorella and look to Couturier for guidance.

What’s Couturier supposed to say when he’s not being given a detailed explanation about his own situation?

“Sean won’t learn anything by being in the bleachers tonight,” Lupien said. “He’s not a second-year pro that went through a cold streak. Sean is a leader and the captain of this team, so by putting him in the bleachers, for a player, he’s going to be ashamed to be there tonight. If there’s no communication of why between the two, in 2024, from my perspective, it ain’t always good to coach and establish regimental fear. And these guys are in the playoff picture.

“With your captain, you have to work together as a team. You want to send a message to the other guys, it has to go through your captain and your assistant. So now you’re not communicating with him. So, OK, what’s next?”

Seems like a valid question.

(Photo: Eric Hartline / USA Today)