John Tortorella took over a Vegas Golden Knights team that was flirting with the edge of the playoff picture. A little more than a week later, it walked into Sunday’s opener at home against Utah as a Pacific Division winner and one of the NHL’s hottest teams.
Vegas went 7-0-1 under Tortorella before the playoff opener, a run that helped the Golden Knights claim the Pacific Division for the fifth time in nine years. Jack Eichel put up 90 points for the second consecutive season, and he said the change in mood inside the room mattered as much as the numbers. “Sometimes you need a reminder,” Eichel said, after the team sharpened its edge under a coach who told players he would not bury them in information or make wholesale changes.
Tortorella was hired on March 29, 2026, when general manager Kelly McCrimmon fired Bruce Cassidy. The move came after Vegas had been struggling to hang on to a playoff spot, a strange place for a club that won the Stanley Cup three years earlier. Tortorella said he knew it was a good team when he arrived and wanted only three or four points of emphasis. “I know it was coached well prior to me,” he said. “We’ve done that. I think they feel good about themselves. When you win some games, you feel good about yourself, and hopefully we keep on building on that.”
The shift was visible in the way Vegas played. Under Tortorella, the Golden Knights moved to a more aggressive north-south game and went from scoring 3.12 goals per game and allowing 3.07 to outscoring opponents 4.13 to 1.88 on average. Eichel said the message was simple: “Attack the games. Put pressure on the other team.”
That reset reached the crease too. Tortorella chose Carter Hart as his primary goalie, despite Bruce Cassidy having installed Adin Hill down the stretch before he arrived. Tortorella had coached Hart in Philadelphia and said in 2024 that Hart was carrying the Flyers into contender status before the goaltender was suspended by the NHL. Hart and four other 2018 Canada world junior hockey players were later accused in a high-profile sexual assault case, and the five were acquitted last July. The NHL reinstated them beginning Dec. 1, and Vegas gave Hart a chance after that reinstatement.
The backdrop makes the surge harder to dismiss as a short burst. Tortorella won the Stanley Cup with Tampa Bay in 2004, but this is a different test: a veteran team, a playoff bracket and a coach brought in late to steady a contender that had started wobbling. Monday night, before the opener, Vegas beat the Jets, then turned immediately toward Utah. If the first eight games said anything, it was that the Golden Knights did not need a rescue. They needed a nudge, and Tortorella gave them one.