Jets' Bowness proving recycling can be a good thing
Winnipeg's head coach has successfully appealed to his players' sense of pride to revive their fortunes. 'They were hurt by how they were perceived last year,' he said
Assuming he has the lung capacity, Rick Bowness will blow out 68 candles on his birthday cake next week. Surprisingly, that doesn’t make him the oldest coach in the NHL, at least for the moment. Bruce Boudreau is 16 days older than Bowness, but it’s likely Boudreau will also be an out-of-work NHL coach once the most dysfunctional mess of an organization in the NHL mercifully fires him.
But when it comes to coaching experience, nobody in the NHL can touch Bowness. Including the 1982-83 season when he was a player-coach for Sherbrooke Jets of the American Hockey League, Bowness has been behind an AHL or NHL bench every season since 1984-85 with the exception of 1998-99 and the lockout season of 2004-05. By the time the Winnipeg Jets hired him last summer, he had been a coach or assistant for almost 3,900 games, not including playoffs.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Hockey Unfiltered with Ken Campbell to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.