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Theater and Dance: Rangers fire John Tortorella, media applaud

There is no entertainment like guy-in-major-market-who's-mean-to-media-is-fired entertainment.

By Dominik
"This guy says he had a 'GOOD' playoff?!"
"This guy says he had a 'GOOD' playoff?!"
Justin K. Aller

As you've no doubt heard, yet we clearly need a fresh thread for the commentariat (who began tossing this around in an earlier thread), the Short Island Smurfs have fired -- sorry, "relieved" -- head coach John Tortorella.

Torts as they call him is famously cantankerous with the media. Which is really entertaining if you don't care a wit about his team nor the media members who are most offended when he dismisses stupid questions.

Many of them, if they were covering a post-firing conference today, would surely ask Tortorella "how does it feel to be fired?" and "do you think the momentum changed in the room after that line change?" and other such nausea.

So some are piling on Torts as an affront to the industry:

Some are going straight to the "bad person" tag:

(Though to be fair to Grange, the points about "going out of his way to embarrass someone doing a job" is worthy if true ... unless that media person's job is to try to embarrass the coach.)

Others are looking further upstairs:

Personally, I don't care other than Tortorella did not win with the Rangers, and I like it when coaches don't win with the Rangers. His interactions with the media were entertaining to me, because the New York media frenzy and the franchise on Broadway almost deserve the circus they create for each other.

Should the Rangers have fired him? Quite possibly. Henrik Lundqvist's comments about waiting on an extension could have been hints that the current m.o. was not working. And no one denies Torts carries a short shelf life, in part because, as Justin Bourne noted without emotion, players today aren't motivated very long by old-school tactics.

So Mr. Sather, it's time to hire a winner who has adjusted with the times. It's time to rehire Mike Keenan.

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