The New Jersey Devils Need to Make a Push for John Tortorella

If there is one thing that John Tortorella and the New Jersey Devils have in common it’s their love and intensity to compete in the NHL.

Currently the youngest roster in the league with an average age of 25.4-years old, the Devils have a lot of young talent with a ton of untapped potential, but the team lacks any real identity. Current head coach Lindy Ruff simply can’t nor won’t get it done. They need a new face and voice behind the bench.

Going all the way back to the ’90s and early 2000s, the Devils had a clear identity, and it was that they had the best defense in the league and they made sure to substantially challenge their opponents every single night.

If they were going to lose, and it didn’t happen often, they were going to make you earn the win physically and mentally. Every game had playoff-level energy and it would take a full 18-man roster to compete with them and even then it wasn’t a fair fight.

The New Jersey Devils need to make a push to hire John Tortorella as their next head coach.

Today, however, ‘Jersey simply doesn’t know what kind of hockey they want to play, which has led to mass inconsistency since the end of the Martin Brodeur era. They have all of this young talent, but they don’t know what to do with it and as a result, guys are just tossed into the lineup as the coaching staff hopes they can figure it out themselves.

Sounds a lot like the Buffalo Sabres and Arizona Coyotes. How are they doing these days?

Having a roster this young with this coaching staff is kind of like buying a LEGO set that has 19,500 pieces (we’ll call this set the Prudential Center), but it comes without instructions on how to build it.

Bringing in an established coach like Tortorella gives you the instruction manual as well as YouTube videos on how to assemble this masterpiece. This is a guy who has been building sets for 20-years both big and small and has had tremendous success in doing so.

If the New Jersey Devils want to do this right, they need to hire John Tortorella to be their next head coach after they dispose of Lindy Ruff. His teams have played in a solidified system that emphasizes toughness, discipline, and responsibility.

These are the three things that the Devs lack more than anything else. They have speed and skill, they have current and future superstars in the making, and they have role players. They need someone who can put it all together for them.

Torts will revive a team that was once the most skilled and grittiest team in the NHL and bring them back to the playoffs. Enough is enough.

Their current record of 21-31-5 doesn’t nearly resemble the kind of team they are. The Devils are playing meaningful hockey as shown in their win against the Colorado Avalanche in which they scored 5 unanswered goals in a 5-3 victory after being shut out in the first period.

Even in games they lose, they keep it competitive. It’s one thing to be a bottom-of-the-league team and get pumped by a bunch of nobodies like the Coyotes and Sabres do, but to be in every single game no matter who it is, shows that the Devils have some serious potential.

Above all else, one of the biggest struggles for Tortorella in his career was the lack of support he was given with the New York Rangers and how they threw him under the bus for their failure to provide him with a substantial roster. This has always left a bitter taste in his mouth. What better revenge is there than to go to their biggest rival across the river and to dominate them every year?