The ongoing joke during the Stanley Cup Playoffs has been the Rangers head coach John Tortorella and how short his press conferences have been. As a person that been to a few post-game press conferences – sometimes the coaches just don’t want to talk to the media nor are they in any mood to answer questions from the media jackals.
Don’t be that guy – you also don’t want to be the person that has forgotten to turn off his cell phone. You might do it once but you probably won’t ever do it again.
Dave Stubbs, National Post --- “Typical New York,” veteran New York journalist Stan Fischler said Sunday with a laugh.
Next to this lunacy, Tortorella is just a cloudburst whose 15-second, syllable-short news conferences add to this season’s delicious drama on Broadway.
Torts’s act is well known in hockey, fittingly showbiz in the world’s headquarters of the theatre as his team prepares to face the New Jersey Devils Monday in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final.
The coach’s shtick probably is carefully crafted to take heat off his team, give the opponent as little information as possible and keep the media off balance. It quickly wears thin with many and is viewed as disrespectful not just of reporters, but of the many great communicative coaches who have gone before him.
Predictably, Torts’s players will tell you they respect their leader who will go to the wall for them. And his results —the Rangers now eight victories from a Stanley Cup championship — speak for themselves.
I have to give Torts credit, he is very entertaining and a lot of fun to watch in the post game press conferences that they show on NBCSN and a lot of what he says can’t be said on TV without being bleeped out, but It makes for good theater. I also think it might be a tactic and maybe his antics do take the heat off of his team when they lose.
