Dallas Stars: Assessing New Assistant Coach Rick Bowness

Jim Montgomery may be the biggest addition behind the Dallas Stars’ bench, but he won’t be the only new face as the Stars add new assistant coach Rick Bowness.

Bowness was announced in late June as a new hire, completing the Dallas Stars coaching staff for the 2018-19 season.

While Montgomery will be in his first year as a coach at the NHL level, Bowness has a lot of experience to bring to the table. He’s coached 463 games as an NHL head coach (tied with current St. Louis Blues head coach Mike Yeo) along with years spent as an assistant coach and coaching at the AHL level.

Despite almost 500 games as a head coach under his belt, Bowness hasn’t been a head coach in 14 years. His teams only made the playoffs once under his tenure, when the 1991-92 Bruins made it to the conference finals before falling to the eventual champs, the Penguins. He was also fired twice, once from the Senators and once from the Islanders.

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Only making the playoffs once in nine seasons sounds awful, but a closer look at that record tells a better story. With the Islanders, he came in as a replacement for Mike Milbury, who was working as both general manager and coach, but Bowness couldn’t salvage the season. In a move fitting of Milbury’s particular brand of shenanigans, he went back to coaching part-way through the next season when the Islanders were struggling after firing Bowness.

Bowness was also the first head coach of the Ottawa Senators. Because that was during the time period before the Golden Knights came along and made everyone look bad, it was understandable that the team would be bad. They finished in last place in the league for three consecutive seasons and Bowness was fired a few months into his fourth season.

The other two seasons in which Bowness coached teams that missed the playoffs were years he came in as relief for a previous coach. When a team’s struggling enough to fire their coach, they’re usually in bad enough shape that missing the playoffs is inevitable, so it’s hard to fault him for those two years.

Despite questionable tenures in head coaching jobs, he’s spent the last five years assisting Jon Cooper in Tampa. During that time, the Lightning made the Stanley Cup Final in 2015 and advanced to the Conference Finals on two other occasions.

In Tampa, Bowness was in charge of the penalty kill and the team’s defense. Under Bowness, their penalty kill was the definition of middle-of-the-pack, ranking 14th in the league over those five seasons. In 2017-18 alone, the team was 28th in the league with a 76.1% penalty kill. Those numbers aren’t going to be encouraging to Dallas Stars fans who are frustrated with the team’s shorthanded play. The Stars improved to 14th place this past season, but the year before, they were dead last in the league and it had a significant negative impact on the team.

Tampa has a stellar offensive defenseman in Victor Hedman, who leads a decent defense. Over Bowness’ tenure, they ranked low in the league on some of the numbers traditionally used to judge defensemen, like blocked shots (24th), hits (19th), and takeaways (20th). However, those stats are misleading because Tampa has good possession numbers. Their Corsi/SAT was 6th in the league over those same five seasons. It’s a basic rule of good possession numbers: if you have the puck more, they don’t have it, and therefore, you won’t have high numbers on blocked shots, hits, and takeaways. The Dallas Stars also have decent possession numbers, 9th over that time period, but there’s room for Bowness to help them improve.

Next: Assessing New Assistant Coach Todd Nelson

Bowness’ work on the penalty kill in Tampa may leave much to be desired for Stars fans, but his years of experience will hopefully help bring some improvements to the team.

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