Coach unloads on Blue Jackets

Rick Bowness ended the Columbus Blue Jackets’ season by accusing his own players of not caring enough about losing after a 2-1 home loss to the Washington Capitals on April 14. (dispatch.com) Bowness said Columbus finished with “three hits and 23 giveaways” and added, “If I’m back, I’m changing this culture,” after the Blue Jackets closed the year on a 2-8-1 slide. (dispatch.com) The loss dropped Columbus to 40-29-12, and the team had already been eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs on April 13 when the Philadelphia Flyers beat the Carolina Hurricanes in a shootout. (nhl.com) Tuesday’s finale at Nationwide Arena was a one-goal game, but the stat line matched Bowness’s complaint: Columbus was credited with only three hits in the 2-1 defeat. (espn.com) The outburst landed after a season that flipped twice. Columbus fired Dean Evason on January 12 with a 19-19-7 record and hired Bowness the next day, saying the club was at a “critical point” in its season. (nhl.com) The coaching change worked for a while. The Blue Jackets went 7-1-3 from March 5 through March 25 and climbed to second place in the Metropolitan Division, one point ahead of Pittsburgh. (nhl.com) Then the season unraveled. Columbus went 2-7-1 over its next 10 games, was outscored 33-20 in that stretch, and missed the playoffs for a sixth straight season. (nhl.com) The National Hockey League’s own season review pointed to injuries as part of the collapse, including a season-ending shoulder injury to defenseman Damon Severson on March 26 and upper-body injuries that sidelined forwards Dmitri Voronkov and Mathieu Olivier late in March. (nhl.com) Bowness also left his own future open. After the finale, he said, “I don’t know if I’m back,” turning a postgame rant into a question about whether Columbus will keep the coach it hired three months ago to rescue the season. (dispatch.com) For now, the last image of Columbus’s season is not the playoff miss but the coach’s verdict on it: “These guys, they don’t care.” (tsn.ca)