Stuck Between a Rick and a Hard Place

I’m not sure it’s possible for you to have missed it but Rick Bowness threw an all-time post-game tantrum after the Blue Jackets’ 2-1 loss to the Washington Capitals. The national media caught wind of it and the message was spread across the NHL landscape.

I have a feeling that, for many fans, this was a cathartic release of frustrations and blame-placing that serves as a salve for the non-playoff years Post-Tortorella. I get that and I’m not sure it’s entirely wrong, though I have a strong feeling that the fan-catharsis and coach-tantrum are not placed in the same space.

I’ll get into that part in a second but I have to say this is simply diametrically the wrong approach. This isn’t a leader taking the team to task, it’s bluster designed to hide his impotence and absolve him of any accountability. Not once in his tirade does he take any ownership of the season failures and throughout it he frequently cites an ideology that is best left in the past.

3 hits, 23 giveaways. I don’t know if I’m back, but if I’m back I’m changing this culture. These guys, they don’t care. Losing is not important enough to them. It doesn’t bother them. How can you go out and play like that. Should’ve done this about a month ago. This is why we are where we are. This is why we’re out of the playoffs, that kind of effort. You have to hate losing, I don’t care if it’s a meaningless game. I don’t care. Show up and compete.

The irony of citing hits and giveaways from NHL PxP is not lost on me. He doesn’t care that the team lost so much as how. We can once again return to form over function but that’s hardly the most egregious attitude we’ll see today.

At the end of a loss, Rick Bowness once again questions his players’ character. Why? Notice, he’s not saying they’re not good enough, that they’re not skilled or even defensively stout. He’s specifically attacking something that has nothing to do with his involvement.

This tantrum, in effect, is emotional immaturity designed to say “this isn’t my fault”.

You reached them so long after you got here, where did it stop?

Because it got tough, because it got hard. We talked about it after the Olympic Break, it’s gonna get harder. Everything was good as long as it was going their way, now that it’s tough, we don’t want to battle back. That’s what’s happened over the last couple weeks.

I told them this was going to happen and they didn’t listen. I am the expert and if they listen to me it would have been better.

Some of those guys are so lucky the season is over and there’s no practice tomorrow.

If only I had more time, I could have done something. I would punish these players for their insubordination so hard.

If I’m back, we’re changing this freaking culture. And we are.

Hollow words from a coach who just a few weeks previous said: “It’s only going to get harder from here. And if we make the playoffs, and we are, it’s only going to get harder.”

How do you change the culture?

Oh there’s ways. I’ve been around long enough to know. I’ll find ways. I’ve got enough experience we can deal with this. I’ve dealt with it before. If I’m back we’ll straighten it out.

This is nothing but a naked pitch for a job that it’s entirely unclear he’s qualified for. It has nothing to do with the specific choices he made that undermined the team’s performance, it only creates a narrative and sells himself as the solution.

I reject the entire premise that “hating to lose” is the primary driver of improvement and winning in hockey games. This is a strange fetishization of frustration and anger and a mythology built on comments of some great players like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.

Anyone who has worked in any psychology research, or with people directly, is that they are unreliable narrators for their own journeys. They won because they worked harder than everyone else and because they hated losing. They come to these rationalizations after they have already won or succeeded or what have you. Every billionaire believes they are self made. It’s a story they tell themselves that has perhaps some anchors in reality but is moreso just an appeal to identity.

These narratives can serve a purpose, stoking self belief is a crucial part of being an athlete, but they are not Truth that Leads to Wins. They appeal to our inner self-hatred demons or perhaps whatever puritanical ancestors decided to “settle” this continent who believed punishment and loathing was some form of divinity.

Furthermore, a 70 year old man has to understand that the fact that it was the last game and was meaningless is not a reflection on the character in the room. I have been a leader on a team, frustrated that I cared more than everyone else in these moments too. I yelled and because of that I also have shame. It was simply my ego tangling with something fundamentally out of my control. Heartbroken players, who cared a ton are not evil for not giving “110%” in a fundamentally meaningless game.

He is, and I have detailed this after some of his recent post-game outbursts, still married to the idea that you need to “effort” your way to success. Effort is always a part of the equation but more important is being good. There’s no simple way around that, nothing to yell about.

All that remains is the cold truth that this team wasn’t good enough to be in the playoffs. They surrendered themselves to luck and came up on the wrong side.

Hiding in Ambiquity

In many ways it’s entirely unprofessional to “air out dirty laundry” and name specific names in public. Criticism and the more difficult work of change is best done behind closed doors. On that front, it’s admirable that Bowness didn’t name names.

Unfortunately, Rick Bowness chose a strange middle route. He loudly criticized everyone which means it’s not entirely clear who, if anyone, he means specifically. Sometimes, controlling your emotions is hard. Maybe he isn’t criticizing anyone, he’s just upset at the streak of losing.

In any case, this ambiguity serves a difficult purpose. It allows fans to project their frustrations onto specific players who they feel contributed while also allowing for Bowness to be talking about specific players who he thinks is the problem. It’s entirely possible, then, that fans like what he is saying but he is targeting entirely different players. We just don’t know.

There are a couple of dots that need connected here.

He specifically calls out hits and giveaways. Kirill Marchenko lead the team with 5. A few players had a hit each, Cole Sillinger, Dante Fabbro and someone else.

Tracking giveaways and assigning them importance is dumb. Plenty of research dates back years that suggests giveaways are simply a factor of offensive plays and puck touches. You need to take risks to create offense, something Bowness hasn’t really wrapped his head around.

If his objective is to criticize Kirill Marchenko who, outside of Ivan Provorov, had the most 5v5 offensive contributions on the team this game, you have to wonder what the purpose of this all is.

This isn’t a one-off event either, Bowness has spent a lot of time subtextually criticizing Kirill Marchenko for a lack of effort, for selfishness for not having what it takes when the games get hard. There’s plenty of reason to ask better of Marchenko, I don’t think he’s been as good or as dominant outside of scoring as he was last season. Still, the constant chirps and criticism just don’t make any sense with the rest of the landscape.

Look, this game wasn’t even that bad. He’s making a massive deal about them not caring but they only really lost the game on special teams. They once again took a bunch of penalties.

Kent Johnson, Mason Marchment, Miles Wood. The final player, the final penalty and the game winning goal. Certainly don’t look at the ghoulish turnovers through the game from Wood, Gudbranson and Lundestrom and their next to no offensive contributions at the same time.

Perhaps Bowness is irritated because there wasn’t enough pushback. Maybe the “fans deserved better” though I’m not sure if you noticed that both the broadcast and arena were firmly Washington Capitals favored.

Flip Flopping

After Winnipeg:

Look who was a difference tonight for them. Scheifele and Connor. Hellebuyck made the saves when he had to. So our top offensive guys, they’re gonna have to step up. Time will tell are they handling it well. It’s on them, they’ve got to step up and produce.

He’s more direct in this quote, though frankly his press-conferences are all over the plays and constantly self-contradictory. After the Winnipeg game, Bowness said Fantilli and Marchenko weren’t good enough. A few games later, after the Montreal win, he said he was delighted that the depth was scoring because the team was way better when it didn’t need Fantilli and Marchenko.

He changed up lines for balance saying “we don’t have a forward in the top 60 of scoring, so we score by committee”.

This was the scoring leaderboard at the time of his comment.

Prior to the Montreal win he said the following:

This group works very very hard, this group cares a lot. So they get a little bit disappointed and frustrated when the puck doesn’t go in and we lose. That’s because they care so much. Lot of respect for the leadership, lot of respect for the group.

Prior to the last Boston game:

We’ve been playing playoff hockey since the Olympic break. We have been. Now it gets tighter when it gets down to this time of year. We’ve been focusing on the process this whole time.

There’s been very few bad periods, maybe a bad game here or there. For the most part we’ve been battling hard every night.

I really don’t see how you can join all of these statements together into something that’s entirely coherent. The Rick Bowness of pre-game conferences believed in his group and lied on occasion about basic facts. The Rick Bowness of post-game losses was as frustrated and irate as it gets.

This really brings me to the final point. How Bowness’ message is received depends heavily on who it was truly directed to.

He can no longer point at Voronkov and Kent Johnson as part of the problem. He scratched and diminished them. Maybe he points at Marchenko. Do each of those players have room for criticism this season? Absolutely, I don’t think any of them took the step forward that the Blue Jackets really needed them to in order to be a true playoff team. The first twenty games of Marchenko looked like a true offensive superstar but injuries quickly derailed and he never really recovered his dominant game from 2024-25. Those players also happen to be the youngest and most talented offensive players on the team outside of Adam Fantilli.

But what does this say about all of the time and attention this organization has paid to having cultural locker room leaders? What’s the purpose of having Mathieu Olivier, Boone Jenner, Erik Gudbranson, Charlie Coyle, Sean Monahan and even Miles Wood if the culture still needs radically shifted?

If the locker room, that the front office has routinely professed is one of the best they’ve ever been around, is truly this incapable of winning then what is the deal with their evaluation here? What is the point of some of these players if they are not good enough for the team to win now and also haven’t implemented culture?

If we’re saying that Gudbranson and Wood can’t do their jobs properly, it isn’t necessarily reflected in time on ice or role. If they are part of the organization that “doesn’t hate losing” then sure, I agree with the criticism. They don’t help get wins and they certainly shouldn’t be here for intangibles.

Surely we cannot be blaming U25 players for “not hating losing” enough.

The Lose-Lose

So now, consider this. How does the organization respond to this media-storm tirade? To the attention that Bowness has brought on himself as the righteous firebrand savior of this flaccid franchise?

The players have little choice. If they stand up for themselves, they’ll be cast as “the problem he was referring to”. They’ll have to spend all day answering questions about whether or not they have what it takes to win because Bowness decided to throw them all under the bus.

There are few things more insulting than your approach to the game being questioned to this degree. The story should perhaps be about plenty of other different things. The team took a legitimate step forward this season. Young players stepped up, particularly in important roles, while some were marginalized or moved entirely.

Consider Don Waddell’s role and options. Does he have the players’ back? Will he be weak for defending his players and thereby contributing to the growing sentiment that the organization is inept?

Are Rick’s comments also not an explicit shield on Waddell’s roster management? These players don’t have it and we lost because they don’t care. Well, it’s mostly Waddell who built this roster. He jettisoned Chinakhov, added Coyle, Marchment, Garland. He extended Olivier and Provorov. Ran back the team, made it older and drained assets. Why isn’t this conversation about how the team had flaws that were never addressed? The special teams and penalty issues were all evident well prior to the deadline and neither coach nor GM made any moves to really tilt the needle in the positive direction. Garland should have helped the penalty differential but they just ran the poor PK for nearly the entire losing stretch.

Or will he back the coach that benched Kent Johnson and Dmitri Voronkov and grew increasingly frustrated as his lineup changes deteriorated chemistry and team quality? Does he stick with a coach and move players he strongly advocated for? Does he hire his third coach in as many seasons?

Whatever the case may be, Bowness has masterfully orchestrated the narrative. He keeps his job or makes the entire organization look like losers for not bringing him back.