The Las Vegas Golden Knights completed a gentleman’s sweep of the Winnipeg Jets last night with a 4-1 victory to move on to the Western Conference semifinals. Rick Bowness and the vanquished Jets now have more time for golf. The frustrated coach strode to the postgame microphone and offered some thoughts on his team’s leadership that have clearly been lingering for a while in a bit of refreshing, but frustrated honesty.
“I’m so disappointed and disgusted right now, that’s my thoughts,” Bowness said. “No pushback. But it’s the same crap we saw in February. It was. As soon as we were challenging for first place and teams were coming after us, we had no pushback. This series we had no pushback. Their better players were so much better than ours, it’s not even close.”
There’s no arguing with that assessment. Though it should be noted that Winnipeg had second-fewest points of any team to make the playoffs and were heavy underdogs. Still, Bowness would have preferred to see a little bit of fight instead of a willingness to lay down and go quietly into the night.
“We’ve got to push back. There’s go to be a pushback, there’s got to be pride. You’ve got to be able to push back when things aren’t going your way,” he added.
On one hand, you can kind of appreciate the honesty. It’s tough to know all that’s gone on behind closed doors for months and perhaps he’s been holding his tongue until it didn’t matter anymore. On the other, it seems like it’s going to be a tense offseason if the Jets’ top guys don’t take this as a sign to get better.