Jets don't agree with Bowness comments following playoff elimination
Coach, who was 'disappointed and disgusted,' could have handled situation better, players say
By
Darrin Bauming
NHL.com Independent Correspondent
The Jets coach said he was "disappointed and disgusted" following their 4-1 loss in Game 5 on Thursday, but after several players voiced their displeasure to the media regarding his comments, Bowness decided to explain himself on Saturday.
"'Disgusted' was probably too strong a word," Bowness said. "One of my many faults is that I'm too emotional and that I wear my heart on my sleeve. That being said, I criticize myself for the choice of words. The message, the clear message, is one that I will never accept that kind of an effort in a game like that. I'll never accept that."
Jets forward Blake Wheeler was one of the players who was not happy with his coach's outburst.
"He could have been honest with us," he said. "We could have had those discussions behind closed doors. So, I didn't agree with how he handled himself after that game."
Wheeler, who was Jets captain for six seasons before Bowness stripped him of it at the start of this season, tempered his pushback by empathizing with his coach.
"I think he got caught up in the moment," Wheeler said. "We don't expect him to be perfect all the time, and people make mistakes. … Regardless of what the message was, that could have been done more appropriately. To us, not to you (the media)."
In the must-win game on Thursday, the Jets started slowly. They allowed a goal 50 seconds into the first and finished with five shots in the period. They then trailed 4-0 before forward Kyle Connor scored at 14:22 of the third period.
"I'm so disappointed and disgusted right now," Bowness said after the loss, Winnipeg's fourth straight. "It was the same [stuff] we saw in February. … There's got to be pride. You've got to be able to push back when things aren't going your way."
Alternate captain Adam Lowry agreed with Wheeler that things could have been handled differently by Bowness.
"I think [Bowness' comments were] targeted at our whole team," Lowry said. "We would have wished that maybe Rick would have come to us and just told us how he felt rather than going into the media and saying those things. Especially if that's the way he's felt since February, I think we could've had some conversations and maybe try to make some changes.
"I don't think our group didn't have any pushback. I don't think the comments were necessarily how we feel our team is. I think sometimes your emotions run high, you say things that aren't necessarily as descriptive as you would want them to be or they are so blunt that it doesn't seem or it doesn't generally paint the picture how you'd hope it to be painted."
The lack of pushback Bowness referred to stems as much from his team's effort in Game 5 as it does from the final 10 weeks of the regular season.
Winnipeg was 15-17-2 down the stretch, earning the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Western Conference. This came after the Jets were first in the conference on Jan. 22, when they had a 31-16-1 record.
"I still have to be blunt. I still have to be honest," Bowness said. "There's not going to be any grey area. Again, there's uncomfortable conversations you have and people don't want to hear those things and I get it. … If I feel that I have to share my feelings and get everything on the table, they're going to hear it."
The window to win the Stanley Cup could be closing for the Jets. Several core players can become unrestricted free agents at the end of next season, including goalie Connor Hellebuyck, forwards Wheeler, Mark Scheifele and Nino Niederreiter, and defensemen Brenden Dillon and Dylan DeMelo. Forward Pierre-Luc Dubois, who had an NHL career-high 63 points (27 goals, 36 assists) this season, can become a restricted free agent July 1.
"I think it's just too early to talk about," Scheifele said. "I'm still feeling pretty junky about not getting to play in the last game (because of an upper-body injury) and being eliminated from the playoffs, so I'm sure there will be in the coming days and weeks some time to think about it, reflect on it and then be able to figure out exactly what I'm feeling."
Hellebuyck was more direct.
"I know every single guy can go anywhere and be successful," Hellebuyck said. "Maybe together it just didn't work, or maybe our window wasn't this year. It's hard to say, but the fact you give yourselves a chance, and really when you're at the end of the day, you'd take that. The start of every season you say, 'OK, you're going to give yourself a chance at a Cup,' you take that. So, we can't look at it as a failure in any way because there's a lot of teams that wish they were in our shoes right now."
