John Tortorella is tired of legal challenges resulting in battles.

For several seasons now, many fans, analysts and even players have been saying that today’s National Hockey League is much “softer” than it used to be.

For these fans, analysts and players, a number of factors come into play.

The ones that come up most often are the fact that big checks are becoming less frequent, and also the fact that referees are calling penalties more frequently on plays that weren’t necessarily penalties otherwise.

Well, this “softer” side of today’s NHL was also denoted by a rather controversial coach, namely John Tortorella.

Tortorella explained, among other things, that he was fed up with the fact that totally legal body checks almost always result in a fight or just a breaststroke.

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According to the Flyers’ coach, the NHL is really losing a very important aspect of its game, namely big checking.

He explains that, these days, a large majority of NHL players (especially the newcomers, and therefore the youngsters) don’t know how to protect themselves against big checks.

Players aren’t ready to be checked and don’t know how to react.

Tortorella also thinks it’s a shame that on the rare occasions when big, legal checks are given, they always result in a fight as the other team tries to defend their teammate who’s been hit hard.

Here’s the rest of Tortorella’s comments.

The Flyers’ coach made these comments after the Flyers’ game against the Devils on Thursday, in which Garnett Hathaway served up a heavy body check to Luke Hughes.

In short, Tortorella, who also benched Joel Farabee for 57 minutes and 18 seconds in that same game, didn’t hold back in expressing his thoughts, which I’m sure are shared by many others.

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