Day 1 of a John Tortorella training camp isn’t about line combinations, or learning systems. And it’s certainly not about pucks.
It’s about survival.
Tortorella’s infamous rope skate, which kicks off each of his NHL training camps, is dreaded by players all summer long. And unlike the first day of school for children, it always delivers the expected pain.
“I’d say it lived up to everything that I’ve heard about it,” Jamie Drysdale said, just after making it through the skate for the first time in his Philadelphia Flyers career. “It was a grind, it was really hard – definitely a mental and physical battle.”
The current incarnation of the skate test actually consists of two separate drills, but it’s the first that looms especially large in the minds of players — “The Rope.” Tortorella and his staff bring out a rope with two hooks on each end, and stretch it out length-wise across the middle of the ice, attaching both ends to a net. Then, players have to skate three consecutive laps around the two nets without cutting across the rope.
Then, a short break, usually lasting a little over two minutes. Then, they do it again. And again. And again. Until all eight repetitions are complete. Finally, after a run of six up-and-back bag skates, the session is over for that group, and they get to recuperate and watch the rest of their teammates in the other two groups try to make it through as well.
It’s physically taxing. It’s mentally challenging. Some would even call it cruel. But it’s a staple of Tortorella’s camps, because he believes it ensures that his players show up in tip-top shape, and that his players have a shared mountain that they all have to climb.
“A lot of people say, he’s an idiot, doesn’t have pucks on the ice, this that and the other thing,” Tortorella noted. “It’s an effective way for me to judge where people are at, and judge the comradery of what we’re trying to do here.”
And in fairness to Tortorella, he’s not the only coach in the NHL who uses or has used a demanding skating test, though none quite match the intensity of this one. Veteran Erik Johnson, who also is in his first Torts training camp, noted that Colorado Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar deployed a very similar start-of-camp bag skate, except with six reps of three instead of eight. Bednar brought it with him from the Lake Erie Monsters in 2016-17, where he was head coach before taking over in Colorado — which also was the AHL affiliate of the Columbus Blue Jackets, where Torts was coaching at the time.
According to Johnson, Bednar kept it up all the way through 2021-22, the year when the Avalanche won the Stanley Cup. He finally gave them a reprieve in 2022-23, in no small part because the team had played hockey through June 26 that summer.
“We might have actually had guys pass away if we did it then,” Johnson laughed.
The Flyers, of course, are nowhere close to earning such a pass. So the players suffered through it once more, with a good many powering through serious strain. Sean Couturier got a playful push or two from Travis Konecny when he slowed up. Drysdale pushed through obvious pain in his first introduction to Camp Torts. Matvei Michkov pulled up a bit short on his first rep, but after a tap from Tortorella, made sure that didn’t happen again, even if his strides towards the end of reps were labored.
For Tortorella, it’s not necessarily a red flag if a player struggles. Cramps happen, and players unfamiliar with the skate often push too hard too fast, burning themselves out early. It’s about grinding it out anyway, and showing the kind of will that Tortorella wants out of his clubs.
“No one wants to be embarrassed in these skates, so they do the work. I think it’s gotten better and better as we’ve done this here,” Tortorella said after all three groups were finished. “There were some guys that struggled, but there weren’t many people that didn’t finish. And that’s the key for me, was just making sure they finished the skate.”
And as much as the Flyers may dread it, they acknowledge its intangible value — at least when speaking on the record to the media, that is.
“You see everyone grinding through the pain, and it’s something to kind of build off of Day 1,” Sean Couturier added.
Couturier back, confident he’s fully healthy
Couturier may have needed a little bit of help from Konecny during Tortorella’s Day 1 skate, but that was purely in terms of making it through a physically and mentally taxing day.
Health-wise, he was fully cleared for action, after undergoing a sports hernia surgery in the summer.
“It’s pretty common,” Couturier contended. “It’s my second time having that surgery in my career, I had it like ten years ago.”
When asked if he’d compare the procedure to the core-area surgeries that hobbled former teammates Claude Giroux and Shayne Gostisbehere for a full year back in 2016-17, Couturier brushed off the idea.
“I say core, but there’s different types of hip and all those kinds of injuries. Mine, I believe, was minor, from my understanding,” he said. “It’s not like the Giroux (injury), where they get three (to) four months recovery (time). After two weeks, you feel great, you’re skating again, if you really want to.”
So was Couturier’s injury the cause of his second half swoon? Couturier noted that he suffered the injury in December, and the dip in his play really began in mid-January, so the timing (somewhat) lines up. Tortorella was a bit more skeptical, though he noted the injury may have had downstream effects on his 31-year old captain.
“I don’t think the injury had anything to do… as far as his play and all that… Sean and I talked about that all year long,” he said. “We always checked in, and I think it was just a struggle in his play. (But) I think for him and Jamie (Drysdale), I think it helps you mentally, getting things straightened out (medically), it helps you mentally.”
Drysdale’s core surgery definitely not minor
Speaking of Drysdale, he also was a full participant in the bag skate, in the wake of his offseason surgery on a core muscle injury.
Unlike Couturier, however, he didn’t pass it off as a minor procedure.
“I don’t know what I can and can’t say, to be honest,” he frankly acknowledged, before explaining the length of his rehabilitation process in purposely understated terms. “It took a minute (to recover), to be honest. It was a decent rehab, it’s been a decent rehab. But right now, I’m feeling good.”
Drysdale was as open as he’s ever been since becoming a Flyer on the severity of his core injury, which occurred months before he was traded to Philadelphia and lingered all year. Especially for a player whose style is so centered around skating, it hampered him severely — and not just during games.
“It’s not ideal — just from not being able to warm up properly, just being restricted, just doing everything you can just to make it feel decent going into a game,” he noted. “It was what it was.”
Drysdale is aiming to play a full 82-game slate for the first time in his NHL career (he appeared in 81 games in 2021-22), but he will be coming off what by his own admission was a summer-long recovery process. It remains to be seen if the aftereffects will linger at least into the start of the season.
Risto returns as well
The final of the Flyers’ trio of surgically-repaired starters, Rasmus Ristolainen also participated in full on Thursday. Like Drysdale, Ristolainen’s recovery from a ruptured triceps tendon required extensive summer rehab.
“Not sure when I was cleared, but probably last couple weeks, I’ve been fully healthy and doing pretty much everything normal,” he said.
Ristolainen also revealed that he actually underwent not one, but two surgeries on his triceps, which he called “two injuries in the same place.” The first surgery, previously unreported, occurred during the season, and left open the possibility of a return before Game 82. The second surgery was in mid-April, and forced him to focus on rehab and recovery for the bulk of the summer.
Taken in tandem, as he noted, he’s basically been rehabbing for the past six months.
“I mean, stuff happens, and you can’t control (it), and it’s sometimes bad luck, too,” he lamented. “But yeah, I’m extremely excited, and (I have) big plans to stay healthy.”
Top quotes of the day
“I just go balls out the first rep, and then see what happens after. Try to finish.”
– Rasmus Ristolainen, on his gameplan for surviving Torts’ skate
“Finishing (on chances) is a very important thing. I think we have one of the lowest… whatever you guys call that. BPO? What do you guys call it? (Ed. note: It’s called PDO.) Goals against and shooting percentage. They come up with some damn number, I don’t know. They told me some numbers. We need to score.”
– John Tortorella, noting his team’s 31st-ranked PDO at 5-on-5 in 2023-24 and 32nd-ranked PDO in all situations
