Rick Bowness aligns the Stars, needs Tyler Seguin to show up

Updated Friday, September 25, 2020

In the first All-Sunbelt Stanley Cup Final, the Tampa Bay Lightning are facing, for the first time in this postseason, a team that can skate with them.  And they’re facing a Dallas Stars coach, Rick Bowness, who knows all their strengths, weaknesses and tendencies, having been an assistant to Jon Cooper as recently as 2018.  

The Stars trail 2-1 in the best-of-7.  They lost 5-2 in Game 3, although they outshot the favored Lightning 32-24, and with their heavy forechecking out-hit them 59-54.  But the Stars made critical errors, including a botched line change that resulted in an early goal.  “It was self-inflicted,” Bowness said.  “We gave them the first four goals.”

This is the first Final in which one coach has been an assistant to the other.  Bowness was in charge of defense for the Lightning, so general manager Steve Yzerman fired him because of defensive lapses in a Final loss to Washington.

“I was there five years and I was ready to move on,” Bowness said.  “And they were ready to move on from me.  No hard feelings.”

It was not his first hard fall from the coaching tightrope.  The first -– and hardest of all – ended his initial season as a head coach, in Boston in 1992.  At 38 he was in the NHL’s final four, even though his mangled team needed 55 players to get there.  

The Bruins’ president wasn’t satisfied.  “Bonesy” learned he was out while listening to his car radio.  He heard Harry Sinden say the young coach “lacks the royal jelly.”

Sinden wanted more of a show – an agitator, not a soother like Bowness, who this year coached a team to the playoffs for the first time since he was in Boston 28 years ago.  

He entered the Edmonton bubble through the back door, rising from assistant to interim head coach when Jim Montgomery was fired in December for “unprofessional conduct” – i.e., too much alcohol consumption.  Under Bowness, the Stars went 20-13 in the highly irregular regular season.

It’s assumed that even if the Stars fade, Bowness has done enough to shake the interim tag.  Not that it matters very much.  Considering the average tenure of NHL head coaches is about 1 ½ years, they’re all interim.  When Jim Nill recently was asked if Bowness would be permanent, the Stars general manager had an interesting response: “Yes, if he wants it.”

If?  Are you suggesting he might prefer going back to being an assistant?  Or perhaps, at 65, deciding to retire?  He is, after all, the oldest NHL coach.

The more you think about it, the more you wonder if head coach is a wonderful job, head being never far from the axe.  

When I covered the Atlanta Flames in the mid-70s, they had a captain, Keith McCreary, who the organization thought would be a tremendous coach.  But when McCreary retired and I asked him if he wanted to coach, he said, “No.  I’ve seen what it’s done to so many guys I really liked.   The pressure is so intense, it changed them, and not for the better.”

I first met Rick Bowness after the pre-Calgary Flames drafted him on the second round in 1975.  I asked their general manager, Cliff Fletcher, what he saw in Bowness.  “Very smart kid.  Nobody outworks him.  He might not score a lot of goals in this league, but he helps his teammates, and everybody loves him.”

Fletcher was prescient, as usual.  Bowness played 33 games for Atlanta and didn’t score a goal.  But by 1982 he was player/coach in Sherbrooke, and he’s been coaching hockey ever since.  His energy hasn’t diminished with age.  He hasn’t been embittered, like so many of his peers.  He excels at bringing a team together.  

Bobby Carpenter, former Bruins center, recalled Bowness sitting him for a game.  “The next day he told me, ‘I made a mistake; I should have had you in the lineup.’  He’s the only coach that ever apologized.”

After the Colorado Avalanche lost their Western Conference semifinal, their star player, Nathan MacKinnon, said, “Losing sucks, but losing to such a great person as Rick makes it a little bit easier.”

Bowness has worked for eight franchises, five as head coach.  His 143-302 record is distorted by six years with the wretched Senators and Coyotes.  With the more respectable New York Islanders (1997-98) he was more successful than the two coaches who immediately preceded him and the first four who followed him.   

In Dallas he’s instilled confidence in young players such as Denis Gurianov, 23,  Miro Heiskanen, 21, Roope Hintz, 23, and Joel Kiviranta, 24.  And he’s coaxed Stanley brilliance from fading veterans Jamie Benn, 31, and goaltender Anton Khudobin, 34.  

What he must do in Friday night’s Game 4 is pull his highest-paid player from a devastating slump.  Tyler Seguin earns $10 million a year, which is a max contract by hockey standards, and he’s scoreless in his past 12 games.  “Everybody’s waiting for him to score,” Bowness said, “but he’s getting good looks, moving well in front of the net.”

It was typical Bowness, keeping the mood positive.

He’s not saying he wants permanence in Dallas.  “We’ll talk about it at the end of the year.  I tell our players to stay in the moment.  I want our coaches to stay in the moment as well.”