Brind’Amour and Tortorella are so much more than their coaching caricatures

Jun 2, 2026, 12:19 EDT

Rod Brind'Amour and John Tortorella (Imagn Images)

RALEIGH – The coaches are not supposed to be bigger stars than the players. But it’s hard to deny the presences of Rod Brind’Amour and John Tortorella. They are two of the fieriest personalities in the sport, known for stamping their identities on their teams, and no matter how much either man wants to downplay it, each has a massive part to play in the 2025-26 Stanley Cup Final.

Both are known as commanding, demanding, often intimidating presences who inspire their players to charge through brick walls. But both are so much more than meets the eye, and that was clear talking to each coach and his players as Brind’Amour’s Carolina Hurricanes and Tortorella’s Vegas Golden Knights held court during Stanley Cup Final Media Day Monday at Lenovo Center.

Brind’Amour, 55, is experiencing a full-circle moment, having lifted the Stanley Cup as a player and Hurricanes captain 20 years ago, the last time the franchise made it this far in the playoffs. His defensively conscientious, hard-forechecking, relentlessly energetic teams have played no worse than .596 hockey in each of his eight regular seasons, winning four division titles, but it took four trips to the final four to finally push through and reach the Cup Final. The hard work has brought him perspective on the challenge of leading an NHL bench.

“I have way more respect now being a coach than I did as a player,” Brind’Amour told Daily Faceoff Monday. “Not that I didn’t respect the coaches, but I thought, ‘Just get the best players out and go play. Open the door and let’s go.’ I got behind there and I realized, ‘Oh, it is a lot of work. So there’s a huge difference there. The time commitment, everything, it’s doubled. I thought it would be the opposite, just kind of roll in, so it’s a big change. But I certainly learned a lot from the coaches I’ve had in the past. It’s all of them. Take the good and the bad and kind of try to, not necessarily mold yourself in that, you’ve got to be yourself, but certainly you learn from everyone, and I’m grateful for all those guys.”

Brind’Amour singles out his junior coach from AAA, Barry MacKenzie, as a key influence. As Brind’Amour puts it, “coaches to me that don’t get enough credit are the guys that coach the kids when they’re at that age, because you actually develop habits and you develop everything you are and you become, and we get them [in the NHL] and they’re good.”

The habit Brind’Amour most famously developed across his 20-season NHL career, punctuated by the 2005-06 Stanley Cup and a pair of Selke Trophies, was his borderline-maniacal commitment to fitness. The urban legends of ‘Rod the Bod’ grew by the year; you probably know the tale by now of the Michigan State Spartans padlocking the gym door to keep him from squeezing in extra pumps as a college player. And a former NHL teammate once told me Brind’Amour would do all the same workouts as him – but with a weight belt strapped around him. And that part of him as carried over coaching to the Hurricanes, naturally.

“Well, it’s imperative,” Brind’Amour said. “I think every team’s in shape and works hard, but we, I don’t know if we take it to another level or not, I can’t really say. I just know that, I think Taylor Hall said it the best the other day when he said we worked really hard, but we do it with a smile on our face. I just think these guys get it, that they understand this is the way you have to do things, and it’s because it works. And so we take that real serious.”

But that’s the Rod the Bod most hockey fans know on the surface. There’s so much more to him than that, as his charges will attest. He’s not some firebreathing gym-bro monster.

“I wouldn’t say he’s a hardass,” Canes defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere told Daily Faceoff. “He just expects a lot from his players, and we expect a lot from him, as he would always say. You want to play for coaches like that in the sense that they hold you accountable for every little thing. And he’s never a hardass about it. He cares, that’s why, and he cares about you as a player. That translates to the human side of it. He always says, ‘Hockey’s second, family’s first.’ ”

Case in point: Brind’Amour had a rare off day over the weekend and managed to get on the ice with this 14-year-old-son Brooks’ team.

“He loves when all the kids are in the room,” Gostisbehere said. “First thing he asks is: ‘How are all your kids doing?’ He obviously cares about hockey a lot, but he cares about the person more.”

And then there’s Tortorella. Always one to keep up appearances, this generation’s most acid-tongued coach had to steer things his way during Media Day, insisting he didn’t want to talk too much about himself, that he wanted to focus on the game and the players and that, ‘Nostalgia, we’re not going there.’ ” Torts gonna Torts.

“I’ll tell you this: I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunities I have had, but we’re getting ready for the [Final] here,” he said Monday. “That’s where I’d like to go as far as answering questions.”

Torts works very hard cultivating his image as the pit bull of head coaches who will chomp your head off – with the TV cameras running – should you push one of his many buttons. Before this Stanley Cup Final is up, he’ll surely start and finish a post-game presser in a matter of seconds after finding some reason to get prickly. But, try as he might to be Mr. Get Off My Lawn, he has many layers. Like Brind’Amour, ‘Torts’ has lived up to the hype his reputation brought to Vegas, but he’s given his players a lot more since joining them at the regular season’s 74-game mark after Bruce Cassidy’s firing.

“Obviously the first thing you hear is, ‘Oh he’s hard, he has a lot of the hardest teams, but at the same time, we were getting him at the end of the season, it wasn’t like we were doing training camp and skating extra hard for the summer,” Golden Knights center Tomas Hertl told Daily Faceoff. “Good players who actually play with him say, ‘Yeah, he’ll be hard but he’s honest with you, he’s a great guy.’ and I think [he’s been] exactly what I heard from other guys. He can be hard and will be honest. He’ll just tell you straight to your face, ‘Hey, you don’t play good enough, let’s go.’ When you play good, he plays you. He really brings out the best for us. He’s a great speaker in the locker room, he’s motivating you, and so far it [has been] a lot of fun because we [haven’t lost] many games.”

“He brings that fire, he’s intense at different moments, but he brings something else as well as he knows he needs to,” said Golden Knights right winger Mitch Marner. “So I think he’s very good at reading the momentum, reading the moments in the locker room, reading what the team needs. And he’ll adjust off that, which is really special.”

“He’s actually hilarious,” said Golden Knights defenseman Shea Theodore. “I think there’s some stuff that he does that I don’t even think he realizes how funny he is. And he’ll make the group laugh. It’s just a treat to have for sure. Yeah, he handles it the way that he wants. When he’s in the room, he’s part of our group, part of our team. He’s our leader and he holds everyone accountable. But at the same time, he’s very rewarding.”

“He’s a tremendous person, really cares,” said Golden Knights center Jack Eichel. “You can see that he cares. You can feel that he cares. And our team has felt that and responded well to it. I think it’s the way that he communicates, the way that he interacts with you, and you just feel it, it’s just a feeling. You interact with the person, you just get that sense that whatever they’re saying, good, bad, ugly, whatever it might be, they have your best interests in mind, and it’s coming from a good place.”

It’s clear Tortorella has achieved rapid, successful buy-in from his group; the 19-4-1 record across the regular season and playoffs since he joined up attests to that. But he didn’t barge into the dressing room trying to break his players and make them fear him. Far from it. He felt only subtle tweaks were needed when he took over.

“We really didn’t make a bunch of big changes within the team,” he said. You bond by going through experiences together, and that’s what happened. It’s a good group. It’s a group that can handle themselves, so it’s gone very smoothly.

“The way we coach this staff here, it is more about mindset. X’s and O’s, you need to have the foundation down. This team knows how to play. We [make] just subtle little changes here and there. But to me it was a mindset. And when you have a leadership group like we have in our locker room and some of the experience that we have that have gone through it, it just worked very quickly. And it’s them. It’s not me or the coaching staff. It’s them. We need to guide them a little bit in certain times when we think they’re just getting off the road a little bit, but they handle themselves so well. That room self-sustains. That’s why they’re in the Final again this year. And that’s why they won it in ’23 and it’s so successful.”

The Canes are the only team Brind’Amour has ever known as a coach. He’s put almost a decade of hard work – a decade and a half if you count his assistant coach tenure – into getting them this close to the Stanley Cup summit. Tortorella, whose abrasiveness tends to have a shelf life, is on his sixth team, playing the role of fixer. But it’s clear both men are so much more than their caricatures.

Brind’Amour and Tortorella command respect, yes, but they’re great coaches because they understand the human element. That’s why they’re the last two standing this spring.

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