For someone who likes to spend his summers golfing at Oakfield or gardening at his home in Grand Lake, Rick Bowness didn’t hide his criticism of life in the NHL playoff bubble.
“I’m not going to miss one thing about it,” the Dallas Stars head coach said in an interview last week. “I didn’t walk on grass for nine weeks. The highlight of your day was to walk across this cement court to get a Tim Hortons coffee.
“I love being outside at my house on Grand Lake and work in the yard. That’s how I relax. But you really had to make an effort to get outside and get some fresh air and sunshine in the bubble. The hotel and rink were connected. You really never had to go outside to go to practices and games. I went a couple days without even getting outside.”
It’s been nearly a week since the Tampa Bay Lightning defeated the Stars in six games in the Stanley Cup final, culminating in a 2-0 shutout in Game 6 Monday night in Edmonton.
For the finalists, it concluded two-plus months inside the bubble. The 24 teams – 12 from the Eastern Conference and a dozen from the Western Conference – in the NHL post-season tournament were housed in limited areas in the hub cities of Toronto and Edmonton in an effort to safely finish the 2019-20 season after it was paused in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Stars spent the most time in the Edmonton bubble. The Eastern Conference finalists – the Lightning and New York Islanders – travelled from Toronto to the Alberta capital. Both the conference championships and Stanley Cup final were held at Rogers Place.
The playoff bubble proved to be a success. The league crowned a champion and players were tested for COVID-19 each day with zero cases reported. But the isolation, being away from families, not to mention playing in empty arenas, did take an emotional toll.
And life in the bubble didn’t come as advertised.
"Living in the bubble was very difficult physically and mentally. To make it to the final is a credit to the commitment the players gave us.”
“A lot of the things that we read about that they were going to give us, some different lifestyle options when we would get there, they didn’t materialize,” said the 65-year-old Bowness. “I’m not sure what happened. What we learned and what we thought it was going to be like were two totally different things.
“That being said, we handled it as well as we could. Before every night of a game, we had team meetings at 8 o’clock to review video. But we also had family members send in good luck videos. Players got to see their wives and their kids, they saw their parents and their family sending best-of-luck wishes.
“We also had Tony Romo, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, George W. Bush send us good luck videos for the players. We couldn’t bring families and supporters into the bubble so the only way we could do that was on a video screen. It was great to have all that support.”
Dallas beat the Calgary Flames in six games in the first round, defeated the Colorado Avalanche on a Game 7 overtime-winning goal from Joel Kiviranta in the second round and upended the Vegas Golden Knights in five games in the conference championship to reach the Stanley Cup final for the first time in 20 years.
But the short-staffed Stars didn’t have enough in the tank against the Lightning, a team which Bowness spent five seasons as an associate coach to Jon Cooper. Dallas was without five regulars – goalie Ben Bishop, defenceman Stephen Johns and forwards Blake Comeau, Roope Hintz and Radek Faksa – in Game 6 of the final.
Still, Bowness emphasized how proud he was of his players to get to within two wins from capturing the Stanley Cup.
"The most important thing is to keep moving forward from that. There’s no guarantee in getting to the playoffs next year."
“Yeah, considering all of the factors that were involved, we’re very proud with the team,” Bowness said. “It’s unfortunate we had to go through the injuries but that’s part of playoff hockey.
“We pushed our team as far as we could and that’s all you can ask. Our players gave us everything they could in a very tough environment. Living in the bubble was very difficult physically and mentally. To make it to the final is a credit to the commitment the players gave us.”
Bowness said the team was “confident going into the season’s restart.”
“We felt we had as good of a chance as anyone to win the Stanley Cup,” Bowness continued.
“We talked a lot during training camp in July that this would be one of the biggest challenges for every team, how they would live, adapt and accept living in the bubble like we did. It was a big part of getting the most out of your team, how they could handle living like that. The other side of that, we were a very confident team and a healthy team going in. We lost some key guys as we went along but, again, that’s playoff hockey. That was out of our control.”
Bowness has coached more games than anyone in NHL history, but the Stanley Cup has become an elusive brass ring. He’s been to four Stanley Cup finals as a coach. His first was in 1990 working with the Boston Bruins, and he was with the Lightning in 2015 when they lost to Chicago in six games.
“Whenever camps starts, our mentality will be to build on what we did."
The closest he came was in 2011 as an associate coach with Vancouver. The Canucks held a 3-2 series lead over the Bruins before Boston won Game 6 at home and took Game 7 3-1 in Vancouver.
“I told the players, it’s difficult enough to get into the playoffs and then to keep moving forward,” said Bowness, who was hired by the Stars in June 2018 and became head coach last December after the team fired Jim Montgomery.
“A lot of our players had never been past the second round. We talked about how difficult it is to keep moving into the next round. You look at (Joe) Pavelski and Corey Perry. They each have 15 years in the league and had only been to the Stanley Cup final once each. We had guys like Comeau and (Andrew) Cogliano who had 12-14 years in the league and had never been to a final. It was a big push forward.
“The players are incredibly disappointed. We didn’t have our full roster for the final and we still came up two games short. The most important thing is to keep moving forward from that. There’s no guarantee in getting to the playoffs next year. That’s how tough the league is today.”
Bowness said he will remain in Dallas for this month and then return to Nova Scotia in November.
Beyond that is anyone’s guess. No one is sure what the 2020-21 NHL regular season is going to look like, let alone when it will begin.
“Whenever camps starts, our mentality will be to build on what we did,” Bowness said. “That being said, we have no idea when the league is going to start up again.”
