BILLECK: Jets in desperate need of new vision
In hindsight, Jets head coach Rick Bowness was handed an impossible task — changing the culture of this team without removing the chaff. The latter wasn't his job. That was GM Kevin Cheveldayoff's.
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Rick Bowness might as well have sat down at the podium at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas and told Winnipeg Jets chairman Mark Chipman to listen carefully.
There’s no doubt that the head coach’s incendiary comments, spewing like a volcano from his lips for less than a minute, were aimed not only at the atrocious performance of his players on the ice, but from those higher up the food chain.
Bowness, 68, got up off his couch last summer to come to coach a team that general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff assembled, a troubled bunch following an embarrassing 2021-22 campaign that ended without a sniff at the playoffs.
It was apparent then that the team was going to run it back with the players they had, and hope a new voice — as former bench boss Paul Maurice said was needed when he walked out on the team — was enough to turn the tide.
It was wishful thinking, considering it was the team’s frustrated players ripping back the curtain last year on the internal dysfunction within.
Bowness’s hiring quickly pulled the curtain closed, billed as a “seismic” change to the organization by the man — Cheveldayoff — who had oddly just received a fresh three-year mandate from the club that wasn’t going to be announced until a local reporter broke the news.
Bowness, a five-decade veteran behind the bench in the NHL, began sowing the seeds of change, eventually stripping Blake Wheeler of the captaincy, the first step in taking back control of a dressing room that had been firmly in the grasp of select players.
He persuaded some of the biggest question marks on the team to buy in, with Mark Scheifele’s name at the very top.
And for a while, it looked as if the team had overcome years of trying to do it their own way, and were finally seeing a path to sustained success under a new regime.
They sang kumbaya together at a Banff retreat before the regular season began, hashing out a four-pillar creed they would all sign and promise to follow.
“What are we capable of?” It asked, surrounded by the signatures of every player.
“Our attitude and effort is consistent,” read part of the established wording under the first pillar labelled ‘Purpose.’
“We take great pride in being a Winnipeg Jet,” another sentence read under the next, ‘Integrity.’
And perhaps the kicker: “We are willing to adapt to any role or circumstance that is presented to us … we take pride in our ability to be whatever the team needs us to be.”
That consistent attitude and effort nose-dived along with Winnipeg’s season beginning in January.
The Jets were good at being the hunters. But the hunted? They wilted.
Pride of being a Winnipeg Jet was absent in Thursday’s no-show in Vegas. It fled the scene on a number of other occasions — at home to San Jose and on the road at Montreal and Minnesota, just to name a few.
And being willing to adapt to any role or circumstance appeared optional, and only carried out by a few, not the majority.
Perhaps it was no surprise, and even a tell-tale sign, that some of the team’s best hockey was played with a number of players sidelined with injuries in the opening months of the season.
When health returned and the band got back together, so did the real Jets. The disappointing ones.
Bowness, who reached the Stanley Cup final in 2020 as coach of the Dallas Stars, and also was a part of the coaching staff on a budding dynasty in Tampa Bay before that, tried seemingly everything to pull the group back together in its darkest moments.
Good cop. Bad cop. Drill sergeant. Parent. Teacher. Mentor. Therapist. You name it. At times bewildered, Bowness threw it at the wall, hoping it would stick.
In hindsight, Bowness was handed an impossible task — changing the culture of this team without removing the chaff.
The latter wasn’t his job. That was Cheveldayoff’s, whose endless loyalty to certain players in the organization only compounded his team’s problems as each year came and went.
Thursday night in Las Vegas was just another example in a long line of them that this management group has turned a blind eye to.
Thursday was an embarrassment, full stop, just as Game 6 against St. Louis in 2019 was.
It’s almost as if the frank conversations the players had with the club around this time last year were discarded as simply frustrated players speaking in the heat of the moment.
Actually, we don’t have to guess at that because that’s how it was described by Cheveldayoff when he spoke for the final time.
He heard passion, not alarm bells. He saw the remnants of an emotional letdown, not a red flag.
And yet here we are a year on, the team not too far removed from where it was then.
Those deep-rooted problems weren’t excavated by a new head coach. He didn’t have the machinery.
Without the tools, and the help from above, the team isn’t any better now than it was then.
That this has continued for as long as it has is the definition of insanity.
Twelve years. Three series wins in the playoffs. And still, relentless loyalty to mediocrity.
The arrogance is hard to look past, especially after the gall it took to ask fans for further financial commitment and a subtle threat if they didn’t.
Bowness’s best bit of coaching this season came Chipman’s way on Thursday night — showing him that change from top to bottom needs to take place.
That’s not just some fan playing “fantasy hockey” at home.
That’s a well-respected head coach in the National Hockey League, who drew handshakes and hugs from many around the league wherever he went this season with Winnipeg.
If he can’t bend the ear of the owner, who can?
This team desperately needed a new voice behind the bench. Now it badly needs a new vision behind the GM’s desk.
sbilleck@postmedia.com
Twitter: @scottbilleck
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