With less than three weeks remaining in the regular season, the Vegas Golden Knights are making a sudden coaching change. The team announced Sunday that they have fired head coach Bruce Cassidy, replacing him with former Lightning, Rangers, Canucks, Blue Jackets and Flyers head coach John Tortorella.
“With the stretch run of the 2025-26 regular season upon us, we believe that a change is necessary for us to return to the level of play that is expected of our club,” Golden Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon said in a statement. “With John Tortorella, we bring in a Stanley Cup Champion as well as one of the most experienced and respected coaches in the NHL. His guidance will be a great asset to our team at the pivotal point in the season we currently face.”
Vegas is currently 32-26-16 and solidly in playoff position, though the team has only won three of its last 10 games. The Golden Knights’ last two games were both losses in added time, with an overtime loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Thursday and a shootout loss to the Washington Capitals on Saturday.
Cassidy joined Vegas in 2022, and won a Stanley Cup with the team in his first year as head coach. He led the team to the postseason three seasons in a row, and was set to do the same this year.
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Instead, McCrimmon will hand over the reins to Tortorella, a veteran NHL head coach who won his only Stanley Cup in 2004 with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Tortorella was fired by the Flyers last year after getting into “a heated verbal exchange” with one of his players and publicly said that he was “not really interested in learning how to coach” in a losing season.
Tortorella will coach the last eight games of the regular season before helping the team in the playoffs. As of Sunday, Vegas is third in the admittedly lackluster Pacific Division, making a postseason berth quite easy to lock up in the coming weeks.
The standard has been incredibly high for the Golden Knights since the beginning: Vegas has only missed the playoffs once in the team’s nine-year history, failing to qualify in 2022. That failure quickly led to the firing of head coach Peter DeBoer, who was replaced by Cassidy that offseason.
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Cassidy will be an attractive option for teams hoping to make a coaching change. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Kings became the first team to fire their head coach, but more will likely follow after the conclusion of the NHL regular season in mid-April.
