After a dismal finish to the year, Blue Jackets head coach Rick Bowness vowed at the end of last season to change this team's culture if he was brought back. He's back, but five games into his first full year as head coach, all we are hearing is the same cutting remarks.
Where is the culture change?
Indeed, from the outside looking in, this team still looks the exact same. Fragile, undisciplined, and lets be honest here: carefree. In their five starts, I think we can honestly only look at one game and say they played well.
On opening night against Buffalo, I thought they looked really shaky. That wasn't unexpected, with the shortened preseason and training camp. They scored pretty easily against a similarly shaky Sabres team and took the two points. Lots to work on, but still took the two points. Good enough.
But in game #2, they were simply flat and unprepared. The Utah Mammoth skated them into the ground, exposing their defensive zone scheme and scoring seemingly at will. In game #4 in St Louis, this all played out once again.
Game #5 on Tuesday was the worst score of all, but they did some good things at even strength. The issue was, they just could not stop taking penalties. And, when the game did not remain at even strength (whether to their advantage or Florida's), their special teams were abysmal.
The only game I've liked out of this group so far was game #3, when they hosted the Pittsburgh Penguins. They gave us a glimpse at just how good they can be, and they did it against a talented team that still has some gas in the tank.
Through all of this, the message from Bowness has remained the same. Every answer has been "these guys" or "if they don't". There is just one problem with this: when is he going to bring forth the accountability that is going to change this team's culture? It seems like all he's doing is making himself look like he's better than them.
Culture change starts with accountability.
This staff elected to play this year without a captain, which is fine, considering the circumstances. We've talked about that before, so we won't dive into that topic here.
However, for a team that is supposedly loaded with guys capable of leading...where is the leadership? At every loss, we see and hear the same things from the players. We have to do this or that better. We have to stay out of the box. We have to look in the mirror.
Sure, those are all wonderful clichés. But it hasn't meant anything other than baseless words to this point. From the outside perspective, there is nobody in that room driving higher standards. You know, doing what a captain would do.
Instead, every time they lose a game, we get the head coach standing in front of the media and dragging the entire team through the mud. I don't think the NHL on TNT panel was wrong in anything they said last night. At some point, this starts to fall on deaf ears with the players:
The boys discussed Bones going off on his squad after a 7-3 beat down from the Panthers 👀 pic.twitter.com/Dx3zVZ0VdL
— NHLonTNT (@NHL_On_TNT) October 15, 2026
I'm certainly not an NHL head coach, but I have to ponder: if he wants his team to be embarrassed about that hockey game, maybe embarrassing them on camera is the wrong way to go about it? It seems like this shifted the focus from the game, to himself.
You can only go nuclear so many times, and Bones has gone nuclear at least twice already this season. If the players truly aren't ready to play, that's something he has the power to control.
After all, there has been one guy sitting in the press box for every game so far. And, he has a 7th defenseman now that Damon Severson is back in the lineup.
The biggest tool within a coach's grasp in this day and age is ice time. Instead of putting the entire team on blast after every loss, why not utilize those extra players to put pressure on the guys who are the issue?
On Tuesday night, I can pick out one forward and one defenseman who could definitely use a night off thanks to their poor decision making. That kind of coaching would send a message to the entire team-which is the message Bowness has promised all along. That they aren't here to dick around.
I get that this takes time, and that culture change doesn't come overnight. But it feels like they are going about changing this culture in the wrong way, which is the same pitfall that so many other coaches here have fallen into over this team's entire existence.
None of us are in any hurry to sign up for another rebuild, so hopefully they figure it out soon.
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